Author: Malcolm Goodale; publisher: Heinle Cengage Learning, 1987
While the book is definitely “old-timey”, it’s also easy to peruse, very useful, and fortunately, light-hearted. It offers a variety of ways to speak in business settings, from presenting your argument or “taking the floor”, to how to pre-empt an interruption when you do have the floor. These expressions are accompanied by annotations on how to adjust them for varying levels of formality and tentativeness. Here’s a glimpse of the material.
excerpt from the chapter on Clarifying
Some things to do with the materials:
1) Speaking Practice: orchestrate paired conversations, assigning roles or positions; ask one party to make an adamant statement, while the other party tries to convince them to change their stand. Put persuasive expressions at different formality levels on 3 x 5 cards so the “persuader” can lay out the cards and quickly find the best way to ask questions, express reservations, challenge opinions, and make reassurances, all the while staying within the level of formality or tentativeness you establish at the start.
2) Listening Practice: survey the internet, find a speech or conversation of import, and “capture” as many of the expressions as possible. If you are working on statements and argumentation, speeches are a good source. If you are working on expressing opinions, interviews provide a good source.
3) Business Collocations: each chapter asks students to match collocates, e.g. find the match for “vested” (in this case, “interest”) ; or students may be asked to assemble problematic prepositional phrases, such as “___behalf___” (= on behalf of). Ask students to register on a corpora site like http://www.americancorpus.org, and search for (in these examples) what nouns occur after the verb “vested”, and what prepositions occur before and after the word “behalf”. Bring to class, discuss, predict, and analyze the phrase’s usage and the context in which we found them.
Strengths: 1) People not only have to use these expressions appropriately, as well as understand the implications of the speaker’s word choices in formal meetings (e.g. Has the speaker just switched from formal to friendly?) 2) My clients/students like learning this material in this ‘language-function’ way.
Handicaps: 1) written using British expressions. If you are an American English teacher, be sure to read ahead so you know what’s there and what’s missing. 2) It’s so “old-timey” that you might not be able to find it.