Addictive Business English 

I'm here with Liz Mackie today. Liz, where are you in the world, Liz? 

I'm in France, near Béziers. Let's put Béziers on the map. 

I don't know where that is, north? south?

It's in the south, it's on the south. It's not on the coast, but it's very close. Do you know Montpellier? 

Yes. 

So it's Montpellier, it's west of Montpellier. Okay. We've got Montpellier, Béziers, Narbonne, Pépignan, Espagne. 

You're going into rugby country I think. 

Oh big time. Yeah. Yeah. 

My sport as well. Great. So you're helping business people and is there anything in particular that you help business people to achieve with their English? What's your focus? 

My focus is in -service adults, business professionals, and many of them are project managers or software developers who need to talk about abstract concepts quite often, and sales negotiators. They love their conditional sentences. The ultimate negotiators tool is the conditional sentence. And anyone involved in technical delivery or risk management, lawyers, European Union officials, dare I say, involved with regulation and compliance. But as you know, very often what they want is the pragmatic language and they will bring the technical language to the lesson themselves. Right, I see. So they just need, they have the main pieces and you need to provide... provide the sentence structure, preposition use, phrasal verbs, idiomatic language. That's they need that unpacked and they need to be able to practice that. 

Let's, let's talk about how, how, why I teach, why do I teach and how did I get there. Yeah. Well, a pretty, pretty strange transition, you might say career transition from being a project manager in various educational settings. So, applying planning management soft skills to mainly IT development projects. And I was working for the larger of the two universities that we have in Cambridge for many years in different HR and educational settings. And And just got to that difficult age that we ladies get to, when I decided that I wanted to try something different. So I enrolled on a CELTA course at Cambridge Regional College. And it was the first blended in -person plus online CELTA, which had its challenges. It was a bit of a rough road, not least because I didn't represent a typical CELTA candidate. That was interesting. But I loved teaching small groups and it was the interaction with the students that absolutely got me hooked. Yeah. That's the thing, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's my story. And I've taught online since 2016. That was my plan because I'm, you know, way off retirement. I was way off retirement in 2016. So I had to find something to do, something where I could earn some money, but also be a useful member of French society. And online teaching was it. And bizarrely, the COVID, the dreadful time of COVID hit. And it was just at that, being in the right place at the right time, my teaching load just shot up. 

Yes, so that was just pure luck. And now at a ripe old age and thinking about retirement and thinking, do I really want to stop teaching online? I don't think I can. 

Yeah, it's kind of addictive, isn't it? It's, yeah, like you said, the students getting to know people. Yeah, that's why we keep doing it. 

It's so interesting as I talk to teachers, lots of teachers doing this, and it's, yeah, that's it. It's the interaction that keeps us going. 

Well, the most recent breakthrough is my French gentleman from the island of Réunion, and he was terrified of speaking and terrified of making mistakes. And now he isn't. He speaks, He makes mistakes, but I understand what he's trying to tell me, and that is, that's the key change I've noticed, and it's almost a non -linguistic change, it's just an elevation of his confidence levels. What's made that happen, do you think? I think a lot of trying to understand, as a teacher, that that's what he was scared of, fundamentally, and just providing a lot of appropriate stimulus learning materials, images, situations that are very relatable for him. Everybody's pretty much used an airport, but when you, you airports are great. You know, we've had two lessons on airports, positive experiences, negative experiences. And he really started talking. He's at A2 level.

So he suffers from the classic French fear of speaking and getting it wrong. And I hope I've taken the sting out of it so that he understands, have a go, try. Let's negotiate meaning together, which is essentially what, when they leave the classroom and when they meet a native speaker of that language, it's essentially what they have to do anyway. Isn't it? Yeah. Skill of, ooh, that wasn't quite right. Person didn't quite understand me. Let me keep trying, keep pressing these buttons.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's so important to provide that safe space in the classroom. You can just, yeah, you make a little step together. Yeah. Oh, that's great. I was pleased. Yeah, yeah, good for him. 

It's hard to take that first step to actually book the lessons. Have you ever, I mean, what do you think it takes to like finally, you know, click the button and book?

Um, I think with the French, I think it's hearing me speak French. Having two languages is so powerful as a teacher, not only for recruitment and onboarding, but getting into those sudden difficult areas where I do use L2 from time to time, and it get you out of a tight spot. Yeah. But I try not to, it's got to be used sparingly. But I think for the others who are not French speakers, I think it's my ability to talk about those scenarios where they feel they need help. And that's anticipation, especially if you're talking about business English users, those moments that might resonate with them, difficult meeting, somebody speaking too fast, they're not confident to ask for that native speaker to slow down. When I feel that it's entirely justifiable for them to say, or could you reformulate that, could you clarify, I didn't quite get that bit. So that's one of the things, one of the business scenarios I teach is asking for clarification and that can then lead into ideas about rephrasing, saying the same thing And of that's a high -end IELTS skill, anyway. Yeah, yeah. So... So useful. Yeah, whatever level you are, it's so useful.

You said you're not sure if you want to retire now, so what keeps you... What keeps you coming back to being an English teacher? 

I think it's seeing people progress and lose that fear. With the French gentleman, it was the fear of speaking. With other students, it's the fear of making that career transition and being able to talk about how their experience might relate in another area or joining a different company. It's that that keeps me going, that those changes that they are making for themselves, but that we as teachers facilitate, I think. That's a good feeling, isn't it? 

Yeah. Great. Thank you, Liz.

To get in contact with Liz check out the Elevate Directory of English language teachers