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33Развитие навыков делового письма у студентов с продвинутым уровнем владения английским языком
Виноградова Татьяна Владимировна,
старший преподаватель, ФГБОУ ВО «Российская академия народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте Российской Федерации» E-mail: vinogradova-tv@ranepa.ru
Сумина Виктория Валентиновна,
старший преподаватель, ФГБОУ ВО «Российская академия народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте Российской Федерации» E-mail: sumina-vv@ranepa.ru
Липина Анна Алексеевна,
кандидат филологических наук, доцент,
ФГБОУ ВО «Российская академия народного хозяйства
и государственной службы при Президенте Российской
Федерации»
E-mail: anna_lipina2011@mail.ru Советов Иван Михайлович,
кандидат филологических наук, старший преподаватель, ФГБОУ ВО «Российская академия народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте Российской Федерации»
E-mail: sovetov-im@ranepa.ru
Удовика Татьяна Владимировна,
старший преподаватель, ФГБОУ ВО «Российская академия народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте Российской Федерации» E-mail: udovika-tv@ranepa.ru
Данная работа направлена на развитие у студентов навыков письма BEC Higher, таких как логическое мышление, умение грамотно строить переходы между смысловыми единицами, умение хорошо формулировать содержание и уверенное владение английским языком. Специализация «Преподавание в рамках подготовки к экзамену» считается довольно сложной и в то же время чрезвычайно полезной для преподавания, размышлений и написания работ, особенно когда необходимо вывести этот процесс на новый уровень. Работа основана на исследовании группы из 11 студентов, получающими степень бакалавра, которые собираются сдавать экзамен «C1 Business Higher». Этот экзамен включен в образовательную программу студентов потому, что он принимается многими российскими и европейскими университетами при поступлении в магистратуру. Кроме того, многие компании доверяют качеству оценки Cambridge.
Ключевые слова: коммуникация, деловое письмо, навыки письма, деловой контекст, электронное письмо.
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Importance of Business Correspondence
Business correspondence helps companies contact partners, customers, and shareholders. Everything the staff write must be tailored in a proficient, comprehensive, and informative way. Thus, the receivers will clearly understand the message.
Business writing is a type of communication that is used almost every day in the corporate world. It comes in the form of emails, memos, reports, new policies and instructions to client presentations, research and development, and marketing campaigns. Poor business writing may be costly and lead to disastrous consequences.
Writing skills ensure effective business communication. Good writing skills have always been important, but in today's age of state-of-the-art technology even more so. Being able to accurately and succinctly convey what one is trying to say is an invaluable skill, especially when your audience is busy and has limited time.
With endless resources, making simple spelling and grammar mistakes can indicate much more than it did before today's innovative technologies. Careless mistakes can give the impression that one doesn't care enough to double-check the writing. Technology has made everyone a writer, and writing is a very visible skill that should represent one's professional goals.
The author needs to be able to hold the reader's interest with a piece of writing. Most people are not willing to put in the time to sit down and read through a novel-length email, so whatever one writes needs to grab the reader's attention in the first couple of lines.
The challenge with making things more concise is preserving the clarity of the message that one is trying to convey. When trying to make the text as short as possible, the true meaning of what is being said can easily be lost.
But the most obvious reason that good business writing is important is that it will give the company credibility. If one lacks good writing skills, they may seem less intelligent or less qualified, and if a piece of writing has obvious mistakes, potential customers will not feel confident in paying money for such services. Good business writing inspires confidence in the author and his business. That's why each piece of writing must be well-written and properly constructed.
It's clear that business students should be taught business writing to acquire the necessary skills for their future career. Though emails are a slower and longer form of communication than face-to-face conversations, emailing gives students an opportunity to focus deeply on language and structure. Writing emails
helps them practice composing natural-sounding English. Emails are still everywhere in business, job applications, and the social world.
Emails can also help cover a number of different teaching points with students, such as:
- the difference in personal and professional language;
- they reinforce the grammar of conditional versus present simple, thus, teaching rapport and friendly tone;
- they offer flexible context for multiple grammar points, such as forming questions, teaching perfect tenses, etc.
Relevance
Language competency, i.e. awareness of the lexical system, grammar structure, choice of words depending on the purpose of communication, is the key issue in formal business correspondence because it demonstrates skills of the person who is writing an e-mail as well as sends a message of the company the employee works for.
E-mails are one of the most commonly used forms of communication as it is cheap, fast and effective. The language there should be simple, concise, and professional [7, p.18-19].
Style or register here is one of the key issues because business is all about reaching its goal, being efficient. There are two types of business e-mails: formal or semi-formal.
Formal e-mails are used when writing somewhere outside the company or to superiors, whereas semi-formal e-mails are used for "in-house" correspondence, between colleagues.
Planning any e-mail includes:
1) Purpose
2) Audience
3) Paragraphing
4) Functional phrases
The major difference between formal and semi-formal e-mails lies in a functional language, opening, and closing phrases: Hi, Hello, Dear all are common greetings in semi-formal correspondence while Dear Sir/ Madam, Messers are for formal openings.
Closing phrases are different as well: Should you have any quarries, please do not hesitate to contact me, Yours sincerely -for formal e-mails and correspondingly; Best wishes, regards -for a semi-formal closure.
It is commonly accepted that teaching essential letter phrases is rather easy but teaching collocations is quite challenging because collocations are all about " how we speak it here".
And students very often refer to L1 word for word translation and wonder why it is not relevant in the context.
As Lewis M. claims, "The reason so many students are not making any perceived progress is simply that they have not been trained to notice which words go with which. They may know a lot of individual words which they struggle to use, along with their grammatical knowledge, but they lack the ability to use those
words in a range of collocations which pack more meaning into what they say or write" [5, p. 14].
In our teaching strategy we, first of all, draw students' attention to words that always go together, highlight them and analyze the type of the collocation (noun+noun, adverb+ adjective, verb + noun, noun+verb).
Secondly, apart from reading, doing vocabulary exercises can be a valuable source of having a collocation competence, i.e. mistakes correction in the sentences with a wrong collocation, matching exercises (L1 vs L2), drilling collocations can also prove to be very useful. The latter can be turned into a captivating game: after the students have been provided with the support material, they are able to voice a movie clip using as many good collocations as possible. Another challenging game may be a team competition: a teacher provides his\her students with a text, highlights the keywords, and asks them to find the words that go with them. The fastest team is the winner.
Speaking of the support material, besides our textbooks, there are such sources as English Collocations in Use Advanced. [6]
Moreover, we provide the students with collocations for their formal/semi-formal writing. See Appendix 1.
The purpose of studying collocations is not to learn specific collocations but to understand the mechanism that leads to the formation of these collocations. The concept of words collocations must be studied in certain contexts, these being the key factors in studying individual words. Thus, collocations have to be taught in the wider situational context they appear in [1, p. 267].
To conclude the present chapter, we would like to say that attainable goals in teaching business language competence must be set, motivational factors triggering self-study approach to be launched, situa-tional context to be provided.
Coherence
A lot of emails are sent daily in business. Unfortunately, many of them are not effective: the recipient is unclear on how to reply or act. Making emails coherent, that is consistent, clear, and easy to understand, is in the foreground of business communication.
The most important rule in email writing is to supply an email with a strong structure. The sender should follow it in strict succession to reach the recipient.
Here come more particular recommendations on how to make your email coherent.
1. Use the subject line.
Many people don't do this.
The subject line is the mini-summary of your email. It provides the biggest opportunity to ensure your email gets read. The goal of the subject line is to get your reader to open the email without tricking them. It should be a 3-to-8-word overview of the content.
2. Start with an appropriate greeting.
Your greeting should be professional and concise, such as "Dear Bob".
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If you are on formal terms with the reader, use his/ her family name: "Dear Mrs. Jackson".
You can simply write "Hi, Doris" if your relationship is friendly. If you don't know the name of the person you are forwarding the email to, use: "To whom it may concern" or "Dear Sir/Madam".
3. Brief pleasantry.
If you are emailing someone for the first time, your opening line could be a short pleasantry connecting you and the recipient. One sentence should be enough. Indicate how you are connected. This reminder will give the reader context for the following information.
"It was great to meet you at the last night's networking event."
If you've received something from the recipient, offer your thanks. Wordy politeness often can be overlooked in efforts to be brief in emails. However, please and thank you should be included any time it is appropriate. It could be a thank you for assistance, an interesting piece of content, or even for simply reading the email.
"I appreciate you taking the time to help me with this project."
"Thank you for contacting Greenhouse Company."
If you want to keep it general, warm well-wishes will do.
"I hope you are well."
Phases of the above kind will make you appear more polite.
4. Indicate your purpose.
Sometimes it may be impossible to include a line of thanks in the email.
Choose the alternative stating your purpose. Let the reader get the purpose of the email from the very beginning and then move into the main text of your email. This task should be presented clearly and directly after the pleasantry. Be concise and direct. Don't hide your request or it can easily be overlooked or ignored.
"I am writing to enquire about..."
"Please provide your feedback on the budget."
"Did you have any revisions to the final report?"
5. Additional information.
It could be clarification on the task, a link to resources or examples, or other helpful information. Only directly relevant content should be added.
6. Add your closing remarks.
It simply indicates that the email is complete. While it is not a requirement in modern email writing, a brief, polite phrase will nicely round out your email.
Professional closing is "Best regards", "Sincerely", "Thank you".
Avoid "Best wishes" or "Cheers" unless you are good friends with the reader.
7. Sign-off and signature.
The phrasing should match the formality of the email.
=f 8. Take a moment to review your email. " Check it for grammatical and spelling errors. Mind g that people tend to read emails quickly, so keep your S sentences short and clear. Your careful attention to I grammar, spelling, and punctuation is very important;
it contributes to a professional image of yourself and your company.
All participants of business communications are interested in writing and receiving effective emails. Structure your email according to the above recommendations to make it concise and clearly convey the information and request to the reader.
Spelling
Most students of English are well aware of the difficulties of spelling English, because, sometimes, there is no correspondence between sounds and their graphic representation. The prime example of this is the mute "e" at the end of the words ("plane", "fame"), mute consonants also contribute to difficulties (know, climb, knight).
The history of English sounds and spelling accounts for all these peculiarities. Initially, writing in the 7th century was phonemic and the spelling of words became fixed, but sounds kept on changing. As a result, spelling and pronunciation began to diverge. Even today some modern spellings show how words were pronounced centuries ago (knight with a 'k').
It is known that English vocabulary contains about eighty percent of borrowed words. Mainly they are words of Romanic origin (e.g. French). Other languages donated many lexical elements to English, so words of foreign origin have special rules of letter spelling (e.g. cenotaph, prophesy, schizophrenia). Besides, there are about 160 Latin and Greek roots in English (e.g. anim-, cred-, nov-, neo-).
Many words possess similar spellings and that is why similar pronunciation (e.g. allude-elude, proceed-precede). Double consonant letters are pronounced with one sound as a rule, and even in most morphemic junctures a double letter stands for one sound (e.g. immense [I'mens]; illegal [i'li: gl]).
There are many varieties of English in the world. Noah Webster compiled a dictionary that fixed the language to American tastes. Webster asserted American individuality and the difference from Britain by introducing spelling reforms. Some of these, like the French-looking "medicin" for "medicine", didn't catch on. But others did, and have been linguistic markers between two countries ever since. Webster was responsible for such US forms as "theater" and "center" as well as "check" (instead of British cheque), "tire" (tyre), "defense" (defence), and the dropping of the useless "u" in words like "color" and "honor". One of the motives was to encourage American printing businesses since, for both financial and cultural reasons, books with these spellings were not being produced in Britain [4, p. 153-154].
Bearing in mind all the above-mentioned difficulties, students should focus on building huge business vocabulary that is a natural part of their general English word-stock. Besides, it is necessary that students should take into account the register and the language variant they are using (i.e. American, English, Australian and etc.).
In class, we usually devote much of our time to various exercises aimed at increasing the number of lexi-
cal units that students will wield on a regular basis. Another important thing is to write as much as possible in order to improve writing skills and eradicate the most common spelling errors. The ultimate goal is to be able to spell even complicated words flawlessly.
So, building profound spelling skills should be done simultaneously with developing a wide range of vocabulary which can be used in writing as well as in speaking.
Setting Real Business Context. Learner Problems and Teacher Suggestions
A regular undergraduate student who has no experience of working for a business company in the real world faces a number of challenges while writing a business e-mail. To put the student into the business context we suggest the following lesson plan. Level B2
The task is the follow-up class based on [2] Active vocabulary Appendix 2. Objectives:
- preparing to write
- identifying the elements of effective writing
- creating a well-structured e-mail Procedure.
1. Think before you write. Ask yourself:
- Why am I writing?
- Who is my reader?
- What do I want my reader to know, feel and do?
2. Providing context.
You received the following e-mail. You need to write an answer.
Dear Mr. Brown,
Invoice #101555 for consultancy services Today I receive in error an invoice #101555 for services you claim to have performed on September 14. Please note that no agreement for paid services was made between us and no prior discussion of potential fees for your services occurred.
I am grateful for your understanding in this matter and can assure you that if I am in need of professional services in the future, I shall gladly entertain negotiations with your firm regarding your services and attendant fees which I could expect to pay. With best regards, Marc Bashaw
3. Brainstorming
- What is the problem?
- What do I want my client to do?
- If I want the client to pay, what should be the tone of my response?
4. Students write an e-mail to reply using active vocabulary.
5. Evaluation and feedback.
6. Providing students with a model answer, comparing their e-mails with the model answer.
Below we provide a B2-level student's writing. Analyzing this e-mail, we can conclude that mistakes do not impede communication, the tone of the e-mail is positive, a wide range of active vocabulary is used.
Therefore, the student met the criteria of writing an effective e-mail. Mr. Bashow Apple
Prospect Vernadskogo 113054 Moscow 2 Feb 2020 Dear Mr. Bashow,
I am glad to receive your e-mail. It's a pleasure to have negotiations in the near future. But I tend to think that you misunderstood the situation. Actually, you've been provided with services and you have to pay for them in a tight deadline. Otherwise, there will be punitive charges.
Thank you for your understanding, and I hope to receive a prompt payment. You can visit us for any detail.
With best regards, Mr. Issa
Appendices
Appendix 1
Business collocations: attainable goal breach of contract bulk purchase careful consideration cause for concern cautiously optimistic chair a meeting clearly defined comparative advantage compelling argument corrective measures deep thought deeply regret detailed information face the facts fighting chance file for bankruptcy first-hand account fully appreciate further discussion growing concern harsh criticism heated debate hidden agenda immediate impact irreparable damage issue a statement kindly provide lengthy process
Appendix 2
Balance sheet
Assets and liabilities
Fixed and current assets
Depreciation
Turnover
Debtors
To set off, reimburse
meaningful way meet criteria mutual understanding mutually beneficial narrow margin parent company pleasantly surprised rough estimate root cause run smoothly run the risk settle a dispute sincerely hope sound advice sound judgement steady income stiff competition strictly forbidden straight answer tangible results technological advances unsolicited advice unsubstantiated claim utter disbelief vaguely familiar voice someone's opinion waive a fee welcome change
Bookkeeping Creditworthiness Shortfall Factoring Overdue invoice Feasibility study Tight deadlines
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Bank charges To pay upfront
Overdraft Sound procedures
Punitive charges Prompt payment [2]
Conclusion
In the present article, the authors considered the problems of writing an effective business e-mail as well as solutions for a B2-level student of English. A range of suggested activities focusing on relevance, cohesion, spelling, and putting the student into the business context will, undoubtedly, result in more effective writing. As a result, students will be able to master essential elements of writing, such as logical development of ideas, clear transitions, well-articulated content, and better control of the language.
DEVELOPING HIGH-LEVEL LEARNERS' BUSINESS WRITING SKILLS
Vinogradova T.V., Sumina V.V., Lipina A.A., Sovetov I.M., Udovika T.V.
Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
The following paper is aimed at developing students' BEC Higher writing skills, such as logical development of ideas, clear transitions, well-articulated content, and better control of the language. "Teaching exam classes" specialism is believed to be rather challenging and at the same time extremely rewarding to teach, think and write about, especially if you want to bring this process to a new level. The
group of students under consideration is represented by 11 young adults obtaining bachelor degree who are going to take "C1 Business Higher" exam. This exam is included in the students' educational program because it is accepted by many Russian and European universities if one wants to enroll to a master degree program. Moreover, many companies trust Cambridge assessment quality knowing that the test results are trustworthy.
Keywords: communication, business writing, writing skills, business context, email writing.
References
1. Abrudan C.-L., Romania, 2017. Teaching Business English collocations - an interesting challenge to face. Department of International Business, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Oradea
2. Brook-Hart G., UK, 2007, Business Benchmark Advanced. Student's book, First edition. Cambridge University Press
3. Engvid. Online resource. Available at: https://www.engvid.com/ english-resource/speak-like-a-manager-100-business-english-collocations/ (Accessed 10 September 2021)
4. Gooden P., 2011.The story of English: How the English language conquered the world. Quercus
5. Lewis M., 2000. Teaching Collocation. Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Thomson Heinle Language Teaching Publications ELT
6. O'Dell F., McCarthy M. UK, 2014. English Collocations in Use Advanced. Online resource. Available at: https://www.busines-senglishresources.com/business-collocations/ (Accessed 10 September 2021)
7. Trappe T., Tullis G., 2007. Intelligent business. Style guide. Pearson. The Economist
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