To improve your Oral English, you must actually use it.
There are 3 extremely important articles that you should read before embarking on the journey of reading all these 'How to Improve Oral English Series'. They are:
This article may be copied for personal and/or non commercial use.
Please DON'T read this for KNOWLEDGE
You already have knowledge.
Now you need to learn the skill of using your knowledge.
How to Apply the Principles of Business to your Life.
Introduction
In the very first article that I published for Chinese Students of English, entitled: How Can I Improve My Oral English? I pointed out that the only worthwhile way to improve one's use of English, is to constantly use it. I said that Students spend far too much time on Grammar and Writing, and far too little time on actually Speaking. I also said that because students focus all their energy on studying Grammar in order to pass tests, that they never actually learn what it is that they are being taught or tested on.
In this article, my focus will not specifically be on English, but on what students learn in English about Business, and how important it is to learn the theories of business, because those theories can be put to use in one's everyday life.
Before I discuss how those theories can be used in personal life, I do want to challenge students to consider their approach to learning.
Part One
Chinese Students Approach to Learning.
It is no understatement to say that students who study in English, have a tremendous focus on passing Exams. There is nothing wrong with that. However, as discussed a few months ago in China Daily, it is possible for students to pass tests, without ever having the ability to speak English.
A Chinese student with extremely high scores for American standardized tests was admitted into one of the Ivy League universities. But his professors soon found out that he could hardly understand them in the classroom. Suspecting that he cheated in the tests, school administrators demanded he repeat them. Again, he passed with flying colours. Not till then did they awaken to the reality that the student had mastered the techniques for acing the tests, not necessarily the skills demonstrated in them. Make English learning less agonizing: By Raymond Zhou
If passing test is all you are interested in, then read no further.
Why do you Learn Business English?
This is a good question, and only you can answer it. But there are two inescapable observations when it comes to the topic of Business English.
1. Studying Business is about Learning Theoretical Knowledge.
2. Studying English is not meant to be theoretical.
By this I mean that it will not be until you are in the business environment that you get your hands on experience of it. At that time, you will need to recall all that you have learned at University about Business.
But as far as English is concerned, the purpose of your studies is to give you the practical ability that you will need when you enter the English Speaking Business World. As long as students are learning theory only, they will not be sufficiently equipped when they enter a work environment in which they are expected to be able to converse in English.
Let me Give you an Example:
My Chinese American friend was working part-time in a Chinese company in Wuhan, when a recent English Major Graduate arrived for her job interview with the manager (who spoke English). When the Manager asked the girl to introduce herself, she gave a standard introduction of the kind you learn in high school.
When the Manager tried to get the interviewee to discuss her life and career hopes, he discovered that she was incapable of understanding him. Not being capable of actually speaking English, she asked the Manager to translate his meaning into Chinese. At that point, he terminated the interview.
You see, while this student had passed all the tests, the only skill that mattered to the Manager of the Company, was the one skill that this student had never considered important - to speak English.
Now let me ask you some questions.
Would you trust a Doctor to operate on you if he was only good at passing written Exams?
Would you trust an Airline Pilot who cheated on his tests or paid someone to sit for his practical flying test?
Would you consent to be a passenger in a car with someone who only knew the Theory of Driving?
We all know that the answer is "No!"
Studying Business English is about making you Capable of understanding and using English in the Business environment. It is about giving you Practical Experience in the English Language, not the theory of practical experience.
In order for you to be successful in English Conversation, you need to learn both the theory and skill of 'Communication'. But what is 'Communication?'
Communication is the exchange of ideas, thoughts, opinions, information, and feelings.
It requires Comprehension Skill – hearing and understanding PLUS Reading and Understanding
Conversational Skill involves – Questions, Answers, Changing Topics, and handling hot or boring topics.
It requires Vocabulary – Words
It also requires Knowledge – Research – Information – Awareness
It also requires that you have Opinions – Ability to Think about Issues
In Short, It requires that you be able to think and speak without any prior preparation for a particular conversation.
Look at the introduction to any Business textbook and you will see that it's stated purpose is to teach you:
1. To Communicate
2. To Use Communication Skills
3. To Gain Knowledge
4. To Develop Fluency
5. To Enhance your Career Prospects.
Nowhere does the book state that it's purpose is to make you pass tests. But if you learn the subject it should follow that you will pass all tests.
The Purpose of Role Plays
Every text book includes Role plays and case studies that are meant to encourage students to use their own experience and opinions in order to maximise involvement and learning. Role plays provide opportunity to think about the unit topic and to exchange ideas and opinions with each other and with the teacher.
The Problem with Role Plays is that students generally do the exercises with only one purpose in mind - To memorize the dialogue that they construct.
Yet, it is undeniable that there are people in China who detest English-learning. Nationalism is only an excuse. The real reason, as I suspect, is the way English is taught. The emphasis on memorization is such that no joy is left in the process, only endless irritation. (Raymond Zhou)
Memorization of and by itself is not a problem. Unfortunately, what happens, is that students then demonstrate such dialogues using only those partners with whom they have practiced, and as such, the role play does not teach Students to develop free thinking within a real life context.
Role plays in the classroom only provide a Theoretical Platform from which to gain experience. Real life does not allow you to prepare in Advance – or – to stick to scripted material. Only unplanned conversations can provide you with real life experience, from which you discover your weaknesses and strength in discussing specific topics, and only Skill in conversation, can give you control over the direction that the conversation takes. See:Group Discussion in Conversational English Class.-and-Why are Informative Answers Important?
How Do You Prepare For Real Life?
1. Treat everything in class as a Test of Real Life Ability. You can't memorize real life conversations.
2. Do not wait to be told or taught. Don't Ask: "Why didn't you tell me? Ask yourself: Why didn't I already know that?
3. Be Informed! Keep up with current events! Keep informed in the areas of Politics, Economics, Business Practices and New Technology. This requires constant reading and research.
4. Be Self Motivated! Learn to Learn for Learning's Sake! The Real exam is in the Real World. In the Real world you don't pass or fail exams – You succeed or fail at your job!
5. Use your English! Money in the Bank cannot be Spent! You have to take it out and Use it! As long as your English Ability is in your head it is not being used.
6. Adopt "The Buck Stops Here!" as your motto in life. Don't blame the world around you for your lack of progress or failure. You are the one who is responsible for your own progress!
7. Learn to "Put your Money where your Mouth is!" Don't talk about doing something - Do it!
8. Do not hang onto your culture so tightly that you hold yourself Back from being successful by relying on “the old ways”! If the "Old ways" were so good, why do you all forget to be Traditional Chinese and instead try to live like westerners?
9. Do not use Chinese Traditions as an excuse for failure. Square Pegs don't fit into round holes, but every foreign culture can be adapted to fit into local culture. And every local culture can be modified to fit into foreign culture. Failure to try is nothing but failure.
10. Remember that "Nothing succeeds like success!" Many things can prevent you from succeeding, but there is only one thing that can make you succeed – YOU!
Quality products are more successful than mass produced cheaper products. They work better, are usually more energy efficient, they usually look better, and certainly last longer if you treat them right.
Quality service is it's own reward. When customers are pleased with the attention they receive from a Person or Company, they stay with that company.
In the Workplace, A quality worker does his job well. A quantity worker just tries to impress people with how much he has done.
With respect to Customer Relations, One angry customer out of 100 will do you more harm than 99 happy customers. Few people 'rave' about how good a business is, but most people will 'complain their heads off' if they are upset with a business enterprise.
With respect to Business Products, Making the short term profit does not guarantee long term viability! If even one of your products does not live up to it's image or “sales pitch”, your whole line of products will be under threat.
In terms of your education, If you get the top English score in China, but can't do the job you are hired to do, then it is clear that you have concentrated on quantity (exam results) instead of Quality (being successful in your learning). A quality student Understands what he has learned. A quantity Student, just gets good marks.
2. Research
Research keeps a Business competitive. There are varieties of research that must be undertaken by any business that wishes to keep or to increase their market share. A good business manager ensures that the Research covers all aspects of the business:
Most recent Legal, Political, and Economic Issues
Current Market Trends,
Technological Development,
Various Business Initiatives
Production costs,
Service and Product quality
Company development and expansion
Employee training,
Job satisfaction Surveys
Employee working conditions
Customer feedback and satisfaction
Brand or Business Name recognition
Advertising Media
Successful Businesses are not accidental. Someone somewhere, did their homework and worked out a plan or strategy.
When I ask 2nd year University students what career path they have chosen, far too many have no answer to give. They are just hoping everything works itself out to their advantage. Most have no greater plan than to get "A good job!".
In order to be successful in business, and in your life, you need to have both short term and long term plans. Even the Government has it's series of 5 year plans. Governments, Businesses and the Scientific community are constantly researching because:
1. They don't want to fall behind the competition.
2. They constantly want to advance
3. They are constantly searching for new discoveries
4. They are constantly checking out the reliability of Past Data.
If you want to be successful in the future, then you need to begin planning your success. Start developing your quality product (you) now, and begin the process of researching the market place demands (job opportunities and management requirements).
a. Product: Defines the characteristics of your product or service that meets the needs of your customers. When you go looking for a job, you become the Merchant seller who is seeking to sell a product (you are the product) to customers (Business Managers). So ask yourself:
What defines me?
What makes me a good product?
Will this product meet the need of my customers, (Employers)?
b. Price: Decide on a pricing strategy - do not let it just happen! Even if you decide not to charge for a service (a loss leader), you must realise that this is a conscious decision and forms part of the pricing strategy.
What Price will you pay to be successful?
As a product that you want to sell to employers, what real value do you have?
Will your price match your quality?
c. Promotion: This includes all the weapons in the marketing armoury - advertising, selling, sales promotions, Public Relations, etc.
What is your key weapon in your marketing armoury?
When you promote yourself, are you promoting a cheap "knock off" or the genuine article?
Is your only self-promotion a piece of paper from a university or college?
Do you also have the skills that that piece of paper says you should have?
d. Place: (or route of distribution): Some of the revolutions in marketing have come about by changing this “P”. Think of telephone insurance and the internet! A bit of lateral thinking here might reap rewards for your business.
Have you considered where you will work in the future?
Have you thought about how you will get the job?
Are you thinking and planning now for your future career?
Are you actively involved in your own future or are you letting fate decide?
For those of you who came here looking for information, the following are some of the sections listed at the article link above.
1. overview 2. planning 3. swot 4. marketing plan 5. marketing mix 6. product 7. price 8. promotion 9. place 10. literature 11. public relations 12. promotions 13. advertising 14. sponsorship 15. sales
What is S.W.O.T.?
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
These are not just Business Principles. They Equally Apply to Your College Life. You are your own product, and your business and product strengths are your skills and abilities.
Strengths:
What are the strengths of your product?
What makes it better than other products?
Are these strengths being sufficiently exploited?
Are they being sufficiently defended?
Weaknesses:
What are the weaknesses of your product?
What makes it inferior to other products?
Are there strategies you should be adopting to offset these weaknesses?
Should you be removing these weaknesses completely?
Opportunities:
What external factors are there that could be embraced if appropriate resources were allocated?
What opportunities could I take advantage of to improve my product?
Threats:
What external factors are there that threaten to reduce your market share?
What competing forces am I up against in the Market place?
How can I make my product stand out?
5. Advertising.
Different types of Advertising have different rates of Success. 'Flyers' (Handouts – Letter Box Drops) are usually read by only 2% of the people targeted, and maybe 10% of them will buy your product. The total success rate is going to be .02%. But the larger your target, the greater number of sales.
The first point to remember is that there will always be a failure rate in advertising and promotion. Exposure is the key to successful advertising. This means firstly determining the most effective methods of advertising your product; and secondly, ensuring that the product when exposed, is appealing to a broad based or general target audience.
When it comes to advertising (yourself), you do not want to waste time by using 'one off' advertising strategies. This is time consuming. Like researching, there are a variety of methods that one can use to advertise, and all should be used at the same time.
Prepare for yourself now, a mailing list of companies that you might wish to work for, so that when the time comes to look for work, you will not be wasting time. Prepare your Resume now. Be sure to list all of your skills.
You can make the advertising more effective, by first researching the individual companies to determine what particular skills they are looking for in their employees, and wording your resume accordingly. When you send the resume to a company, (whether they are currently looking for staff or not), be sure to ask them to keep you in mind should there be future vacancies in the company.
One of my students wrote up his resume in English and Chinese on my computer. Without telling him, I later sent an email and a copy of his resume to a Human Resource manager that I knew. Two months later, the human resource manager contacted that student.
Another way to advertise yourself, is to create brief / simple resumes (with your photograph copied into the text), and hand deliver them to a number of human resource managers. Make sure you are well dressed, friendly, polite and confident. Just ask them to keep you in mind for the future.
Remember that within business, managers attempt to Maximise Sales, using a variety of strategies.
6. Maximising Sales
The advertising methods listed above, are ways to maximise sales. But there is another key ingredient. In order to increase Sales Potential, I should not try to sell just one product, but Diversify, and sell different products.
Diversification:http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82254.html A risk-reduction strategy that involves adding product, services, location, customers and markets to your company's portfolio. Many small companies are one-trick ponies, betting their entire futures on a single product, a single service, a single location or even a single customer.
Diversifying can help your business weather tough times by providing alternate sources of revenue in the event that your original market dries up, stops growing or is hit by new competition. Most companies that survive for long periods of time find that they have to develop new sources of revenue as tastes change and opportunities evolve. Growth through diversification can help your company have options in place when they are needed.
What do I mean? I mean that you should consider all of your abilities, and in addition to all other efforts in job seeking, you should specifically target businesses according to your many individual skills.
If your conversational ability is good, apply for work with companies (eg Tour companies) seeking people who will need to speak English. If your written English is very good, seek positions with companies looking for secretaries or staff with writing ability.
But over and above all of this, You should be extending your abilities, and developing skills that perhaps are not necessarily directly related to your English Studies. For Example: Typing Skills, Computer skills, Accounting Skills, etc.
In the end, you have to use every available opportunity to extend yourself, and advertise yourself in the work place (which in Business terms for you, will be the Market place of customers wanting your services.)
All of this comes under the overall concept of Marketing Strategy.
I put this here just to let you see how the concepts work just as well in private life as in the business world. (The link above can lead you to websites with information.)
Differentiation: To be different, is what organisations strive for. Having a competitive advantage which allows the company and its products ranges to stand out is crucial for their success. Strategy for assuring customers a positive buying experience in order to improve customer loyalty, increase cross-selling and promote advertising by word-of-mouth. See also 'customer satisfaction' .
MEDIA STRATEGY: A plan of action by an advertiser for bringing advertising messages to the attention of consumers through the use of appropriate media.
Keyword Strategy: The main task of search engine optimisation is establishing the premium set of relevant keyword phrases that will be applied to all facets of a client's web site, including visible text content and a web site's non-visible code.
Creative strategy - A determination of what an advertising message will say or communicate to a target audience.
Creative tactics - A determination of how an advertising message will be implemented so as to execute the creative strategy.
You owe it to yourself to use all means at your disposal to become a good saleable product
The Bottom Line of Business & The Bottom Line in Your Life
We all know that the bottom line of business is the money. To put it another way, we all want to know what is left when you remove all of the expenses (production costs, wages, fees, taxes, duties, etc) from the gross income. Gross income less all expenses equals net profit. Even in the selling of a property or house, the paid advertised price is not the actual money you will receive. There are always fees and expenses to be paid.
So when discussing the value of something, we need to look at the net value, or net profit, or net income.
Definitions of Net Value on the Web:
The value of an estate after all debts have been paid. (Federal estate taxes are based on the net value of an estate.) www.elderlaw.us/terminolgy3.htm
Net Profit :
Often referred to as the bottom line, net profit is calculated by subtracting a company's total expenses from total revenue, thus showing what the company has earned (or lost) in a given period of time (usually one year). Also called net income or net earnings. http://www.investorwords.com/3259/net_profit.html
Another way of saying, net value, profit, or income, is to say, What is it really worth?
With that concept now in your mind, I want to challenge you to think realistically about your life and studies. I want to ask you:
What is the Net Value of your Studies?
What will be the Net Profit?
Are you keeping current with recent events?
Do you have Strategies to keep your Product line in First Place?
Do you have a 'Good Quality Product'?
Are you looking for immediate profit?
Or are you looking for long term Gain?
Do you plan on being a leader in your field?
Are you utilising all opportunities to Promote your product?
OR
Are you Waiting for Someone Else to do it for you?
As I said at the beginning, your business studies are mainly theoretical at the moment, but your English studies are supposed to be practical so as to equip you for the work you will do in the Business World.
Conclusion.
Students who intend to work in the Business Environment need to have a vision for the future, and the principles and theories of Business can help you bring that vision to fruition, if only you will appreciate that those principles can be applied to your personal life.
Learning never stops, and this is particularly true in business. From the day you enter the business world, you will embark on a journey of learning. Now is the time to begin to learn how to learn.
Your future success is largely determined by your attitude, and your attitude largely determines your success at university.
Don't put off until tomorrow, those things that you should be doing today!
R.P.BenDedek is from Brisbane Australia and is the author of 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' at http://www.kingscalendar.com His academic articles set forth Apologetics for and results of his discovery of an "artificial chronological scheme" running through the Bible, Josephus, the Damascus Documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Seder Olam Rabbah.
He writes photographic 'Stories from China' and social editorial commentaries, both at KingsCalendar, and as a contributing newspaper columnist. He currently teaches Conversational English in China and in addition to his English Lessons at KingsCalendar, he has created specific sites for Students of English.
