Ladislav Václavík, PhD. Works at at Masaryk University Language Centre. Ladislav has been teaching at the Masaryk University Language Centre since 2014, where he specialises in business English. Regarding professional interests, he focuses on ICT, multilingualism, vocabulary acquisition, creativity, and motivation. Email: 20439@mail.muni.cz

 

Introduction

As future professionals, business students should be familiar with the latest in finance, business, and politics. To access vital information, they should be encouraged to follow daily news, read news articles of various genres, watch news videos, or listen to multiple business-related podcasts. In doing so, they gain access to authentic materials, which is an invaluable opportunity to stay connected with the English language as it is spoken and written worldwide. The contact with natural, authentic English further encourages learners to exploit their language knowledge and skills cognitively as they encounter various accents and differing qualities in oral output, which can help them anchor their English in a broader context. Lastly, authentic materials help connect the classroom with the world outside, breaking down the artificial walls between teaching and learning and the reality of professional life.

Furthermore, besides staying connected and positioning their linguistic selves in a broader context, students learn how to report information to others, discuss facts and opinions, and present and defend arguments using appropriate language tools.

The following activity also helps build a dynamic learning environment by fostering learner autonomy, as students can be asked to create a vocabulary log, write a business news diary, or set up a business news blog.

The activity usually takes about 10–15 minutes and aims to improve students’ critical thinking, listening and speaking skills, and argumentation techniques.

 

Preparation

To introduce the concept of this activity, prepare a set of questions you can ask straightaway or distribute these on slips of paper among learners, who then discuss them in pairs or small groups. Here are some suggestions:

Are you interested in news from politics/business?

What kind of news do you usually follow?

How do you access information?

Do you use several sources? Why (not)?

How often do you check your information sources?

Do you access information in various languages? Why (not)?

Do you think there is too much news? Why (not)?

Have you ever tried to cut yourself off from all information sources (social networks, radio, TV, etc.)?

Do you believe your sources?

As a follow-up to this lead-in, ask students to report on some business news for your next class. To do so, they can read an online article, watch a YouTube video, or listen to a podcast of their preference. Ideally, students should then write a short text summarising the main points in advance, which will facilitate their reporting in class.

The choice of sources is left to the students’ discretion. Alternatively, the news source can be restricted to one website, one topic, one geographic area, or a particular business sector. Using these deliberate restrictions can help you zoom in on specific issues, thus making the ensuing discussions more topical, relevant, or connected more closely to the problems discussed in your course.

To make the activity more interactive, you can prepare a presentation using mentimeter.com where you can elicit keywords related to the news items prepared by students. This is done using the word cloud mode: students send in three to five words representing their news, thus assembling a set of words that can be exploited in further activities. In addition, you can ask students a question, run a poll, invite them to express their opinion on given statements, or the like. This, in turn, can lead to fruitful discussions.

 

Procedure

At the start of the lesson, remind the learners of the purpose of the upcoming activity. The objectives are manifold: to monitor the latest from the world of business, politics, finance, and society; to be able to report/summarise a text/video; and to express an opinion and be able to defend one’s arguments.

When launching the Mentimeter presentation, tell the learners to send in three to five keywords representing their business news. Students do this individually. Alternatively, you can ask students to discuss their news in pairs, take notes, and then send the keywords of their partner’s news. This makes the activity more challenging, as students have to interpret spoken language and might distort or oversimplify the original message.

Once the word cloud has been created and shown to learners, instruct students to pair up and tell each other briefly about their news – remind them at this point that they will be asked to report back to the class about their partner’s business news. Consequently, learners are advised to take notes to be able to interpret the content of their partner’s talk.

Having exchanged their news, learners are asked to present to the class. The teacher can highlight the keywords in the word cloud slide using a coloured pen. Three to four students are asked to contribute in this way.

At the end of the activity, other students might be asked to retell all the news mentioned in their own words.

 

Alternatives

Alternative 1: Ask the students to stand up and mingle to make the activity more engaging. Let them talk to as many partners as possible, limiting the activity to 10 minutes. It is important to instruct learners to be highly efficient: they should be able to summarise their news in one or two sentences. Learners are encouraged to take notes. When the mingling is over, students talk about the information they heard. Each piece of news can then be expanded upon., with the student who produced the report providing further details. The teacher meanwhile notes interesting vocabulary, common mistakes, or other points of interest on the whiteboard.

Alternative 2: Ask students to prepare short dialogues staging a reportage-style interview between a journalist and an expert talking about the news. Instead of reporting the information individually, students then role-play the interview. As a modification, students can role-play a TV interview between a television news anchor and their guest (e.g., an expert, witness, or fellow journalist).

Alternative 3: Using the Mentimeter presentation, you can ask students to send in not keywords but the beginnings of their news or sentences structured as headlines. It is important to stress that learners should not simply copy the original headlines but rewrite them in their own words. This production activity can be effectively used to revise a grammar point, such as passive structures (e.g., The government is believed to…). In pairs or small groups, students try to expand upon the news, guessing its content. The class can then reconstruct the information in as much detail as possible.

Alternative 4: Learners can report their news by adjusting the level of detail and difficulty of language for various audiences, e.g., a five-year-old, their grandparents, a university professor or finance expert.

Alternative 5: Learners can be asked to prepare an Instagram Reels speech. This modification might be particularly appealing given the general popularity of social media and video content. The time limits (Reel videos usually last for about one minute) might lead students toward efficiency and discipline in oral expression.

Alternative 6: Learners do not prepare any news in advance. At the beginning of the activity, the teacher tells the students that they are to brief their CEO/head of finance/legal/logistics department about the latest from the world. The selection of relevant news items will depend on the role the teacher will assume. This version of the business news activity is even more challenging than the previous varieties and open to improvisation. However, it can also be more engaging and entertaining, as students face unexpected situations and must react spontaneously.

 

Follow-ups

As an in-class follow-up, students might be asked to create a story using as many words as possible from the word cloud.

Other out-of-class activities might include:

• writing a summary of their partner’s business news as a report for their boss,
• writing a short essay about an issue raised by their (partner’s) business news,
• keeping a written business news log, and/or
• discussing given issues on an online forum.

 

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