Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 8; December 1999

"Business English & Cross Cultural Problems"

Ela Gusakowska (English Unlimited, Poland)

Page 1 of 1

My affair with Business English started three years ago. I jumped at an opportunity of joining our ESP department with a hope for a new challenge and experience. There I was, an inexperienced teacher, foolhardy explorer, equipped with such tools as language knowledge and ELT 'tricks'. At first, I thought my challenge was turning into a nightmare – I felt I was trudging through business – infested jungle, cutting my way through such alien concepts as market saturation, or futures and options. But with time, I settled down. The nightmare disappeared. In this article, I would like to describe one of the biggest nightmares Business English gave me in my initial years and present the way I managed to fight it.

I am not going to describe one particular group since the problem I faced was a universal one and common to each and every group I taught. The problem, I mentioned above, concerns meetings and cross-cultural behaviour.

Polish people have got a very specific way of discussing things. If you are brought up with it, you see no problem. However, in terms of strategies for communication in Business English, the Polish way may be ineffective.

It is overdirect and often could be received as an abusive one. Therefore, I decided to investigate the case and find some solution. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no data and no descriptive evaluation of Polish strategies for communication. That is why, I decided to start my own project. The question was: What are the possible problem spots in the Polish – British communication process?

I spent hours searching libraries, when, suddenly, my first inspiration came. Intercultural Communication -- a Discourse Approach by Scollon and Scollon focuses on professional communication in a cross-cultural context and emphasises the importance of proper meaning interpretation. In a nutshell, Scollon and Scollon suggest that in most cases, a sudden breach of any kind of professional communication could be owed to the misinterpretation of signals, verbal messages and gestures particular to a given culture. Therefore, they believe that to eliminate or lower the risk of a breach, professional students should be informed about potential problems and sensitised to peculiarities of an alien code of practice. But it is virtually impossible to predict every professional problem, one might say. To solve this problem, the authors suggest a skeleton for situation-context analysis – Grammar of Context.

The main purpose of Grammar of Context is to analyse and describe the environment in which a communicative situation occurs. It takes into consideration the following factors:

1. Scene --- participants' expectations in terms of location and communication content ( what information should be used and how)

2. Key --- participants' expectations of the communication tone (formal / informal)

3. Participants --- their status; relationship with each other

4. Message Form --- whether it is speaking, writing, or other media

5. Manifestation --- deals with the way members of a particular group find out about a code of practice; whether it is explicit a company's statute // regulation, or tacit common knowledge, traditional behaviour

The second inspiration came from a teacher training session for Business English Teachers led by Marie Delaney. The theme was: Cross-cultural awareness. Since, at that time, I was in my process of building up the chassis for my research, the session offered what I needed – a cross-cultural awareness questionnaire which is presented below.

What is your cultural approach to the following aspects? Answer the following questions.

1. Time – Do you tolerate being late? If yes, how much?

2. Eye contact – Is it important for a communicative event? Do you need to maintain it? If yes, for how long?

3. Small Talk – Do you use it? Do you think it is important? What is your personal attitude to it?

4. Silence – How do you understand silence? Is it meaningful?

5. Teams – Is it natural for you to work in teams?

6. Difficult people & situations – What is your way of dealing with interruptions and difficult people?

The theoretical chassis was ready, my decision was to put together the Grammar of Context and Cross-cultural questionnaire within an inner company's meeting context. I was extremely careful in choosing subjects for my study and I selected two principles to follow: (1) subjects had to work in the same environment, (2) the company had to be a multinational one. I managed to find five volunteers among my students and their British colleagues. First, we established the parameters:

1. Company's office -- inter-departmental meeting, ' A Mission Statement ' a new mission statement which will represent the company's values through to the year 2000

2. Formal code of behaviour, high formality of language, both physical and verbal distance should be maintained

3. Head managers representing each department

Next, I interviewed the subjects individually using the cross-cultural questionnaire (results below).

On the basis of the above, I identified five problem-spots.

1. EYE CONTACT

   My students' tacit assumption was that people not maintaining eye- contact were not credible thus proceeding with any business could be tricky

   As a result: the process of communication could be slowed down and reaching consensus could be obstacled

2. SMALL TALK

   My students believed that making a small talk was a waste of time, since what they wanted to do was getting down to business.

   As a result: the process of communication could be slowed down by different communication strategies

3. SILENCE

   Since for my British subject it wasn't obvious that silence could be used to show disagreement, my students' signal could be missed out

4. WORKING IN TEAMS

   Team work involves submitting to group priorities and giving up individual interests.

   As a result: My students' dislike of working in teams could lead to disruptive behaviour and sequence disorganisation.

5. INTERRUPTIONS

   My students direct responses could be quite abusive and insulting for their British colleagues.

   The above data allowed me to assume that there were three areas to work on : (1) cross-cultural awareness – eye contact & silence, (2) Business English skills – socialising & language of meeting, (3) team building. On the basis of the above observation, I designed a target-oriented lesson. The proceeding session was structured in such a way as to put my students into an inductive team building training within the above mentioned Business English skills context. As for cross-cultural awareness, I felt that all I could do was to sensitise my students to certain differences.

   The project I have presented encouraged me to embark on more extensive studies of the field. It made me understand the importance of cross - cultural awareness in a Business English classroom. Business English serves the role of a medium for a corporate communication, it is used and influenced by different cultures. Therefore, by raising cultural awareness in our students, we help them to improve both the language and their working relationships.

1. Swales, M. J. (1990). Genre Analysis. CUP
2. Scollon, R. & Scollon, W. S. (1995). Intercultural communication - a discourse approach. Blackwell Oxford UK & Cambridge, USA
3. Dudley-Evans, T. & St John, M. (1998). Developments in English for Specific Purposes. CUP
4. Hutchinson, T. & Waters, A. (1992). English for Specific Purposes: A learning-centred approach. CUP
5. Brieger, N. (1998). Teaching Business English Handbook. York Associates