![]() Possible misses here are telephoning and negotiations which are part of the main suite of BE skills, though telephoning is perhaps catered for under the broader aspect of communication. There are 12 work outs in the book, which as I said, mirror the sorts of topics that usually come up in BE coursebooks – meetings and presentations are there, along with branding, leadership and job interviews. The handouts are the worksheets that the students work on and take away from the lesson. The teaching tools are the materials that will need preparing before the lesson – the cut up matching tasks or the separable texts for jigsaw readings etc. There are four main sections in the book, the “Work outs” which are essentially the plans and procedures, the teaching tools, the handouts, and an Idiom dictionary which I think will be a useful review for most teachers before beginning a class. The latest in the Work it Out series from Prosperity Education focuses on Business Idioms and one of the immediate draws for me is the way the structure of the book lends itself to supplementing a standard syllabus / coursebook structure. For anyone who is wondering, to replace an arm and a leg with prosthetics would probably cost you about USD 75000. Being British, I don’t want to tell you exactly how much my new car cost as that would reveal far too much personal information, so I might instead, laughingly tell you it cost an arm and a leg. When we want to be opaque and when we want to be less direct in our speech, it is often idiom to which we turn. Which is a shame, because while a lot of business and office work is conducted in plain speech a lot of it isn’t. I do think that many coursebooks (and obviously some more than others) are much better than at being lexical and functional in their approach these days, but idiom is still a poor cousin to more functional and less colourful phrases. ![]() Having been teaching Business English and corporate clients for nearly 20 years now, one of the things I have often thought missing from BE coursebooks is some exploration of idiom and vernacular, because it really is everywhere in business. ![]() Do you know your arm and a leg from your elbow? Do your students? ![]()
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