By the authors of the successful Business Basics New Edition, Business Focus equips low-level learners with the English they need to communicate in the workplace. Business Focus is for adults in any job and at any level of employment, who need to communicate in English immediately.
Who is it for?
- Elementary to pre-intermediate business English students.
- Busy professionals already in business who may have completed a beginner's course in general English.
Key features
- A genuine foundation business English course, with a carefully graded syllabus.
- A focus on speaking and listening, and language of immediate practical use. Units feature games, role-plays, and special discussion sections, Focus on Business Issues.
- Multilingual word and expression lists in five world languages at the back of the Elementary Student's Book, and a glossary of key words at Pre-Intermediate.
- Every Student's Book comes with a CD-ROM including video clips from the OUP business video series Big City, and audio for all the key words. The Elementary CD-ROM also has interactive role-plays, with a record and playback facility for students to record their own voice, and a bank of model emails where students can copy and paste useful phrases into their own emails.
One of the major difficulties of teaching business English is connecting students' English knowledge with practical communication issues in their jobs. Business Focus Pre-intermediate Student's Book addresses the problem by engaging lower-level English learners into abundant communicative exercises and activities that are aimed to help them use essential vocabulary, grammar and expressions confidently in various business scenarios. As its text and listening materials are based on British English, the book might be most useful for business professionals who are interested in British English or a European business environment.
The most prominent feature of this book is its five-part structure. The book consists of ten units with each unit divided into five parts. Each part focuses on one aspect of business English: vocabulary, grammar, expressions, communication skills and business issues. The first three parts, Focus on Words, Focus on Grammar, and Focus on Expressions provide students with important vocabulary, grammatical rules and the expressions that they need to use in order to communicate in the real business world. Various input and output activities in these sections are designed for this purpose. Some typical exercises and activities include matching pictures with words or phrases, listening to an interview and writing down specific vocabulary or expressions, reading an article and answering questions, responding to different communication situations using the target expressions as well as role-plays. Specific instructions on role-plays are kept in Information Files at the end of the book. In addition to these exercises and activities, students are often asked to reflect upon their own work experience and talk about their lives as employees, customers or end-users.
Focusing on building students' communication abilities rather than linguistic accuracy, the book does not give explicit lengthy instructions on vocabulary, grammatical rules or expressions. Instead, it provides a summary of key words, grammar and expressions presented in small pink boxes at the end of each section. However, if students encounter any new words in the text, they can look them up in the Glossary at the end of the book. In the same way, if students want to read more about a particular grammatical issue, they can consult Language Reference, also at the end of the book. Besides 16 grammatical topics, including present, past, and future tenses, countable and uncountable nouns, comparatives and superlatives, 1st and 2nd conditional, and modals of obligation and permission, Language Reference also contains six topics of useful language and expressions, which are useful for students' role-plays and other output activities.
The fourth part of each unit, Focus on Communication, requires students to produce cohesive written or spoken passages while participating in task-based activities, such as writing emails to confirm an appointment, conversing in a small talk with colleagues, giving a short presentation or discussing a topic in a meeting.
The last part of each unit, Focus on Business Issues, expands the main topic of each unit by addressing more specific business issues, such as making good business contacts, entertaining clients, and choosing the right job. This part requires students to integrate the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions they have learned in previous parts to understand and talk about various business issues.
At the end of each unit, a short End-of-Unit quiz is included. Students can use it to test their knowledge of the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions they have just learned. Besides Language Reference, Glossary, and role-play files as described above, one can also find two other appendices, an Irregular Verb List and Tapescript of all the listening activities at the end of the book.
Video Phrase Bank
Video PhraseBank CD - not ISO-format
It's working on hard drive, simply click START.
Not registered yet? We'll like you more if you do!
Not registered yet? We'll like you more if you do!
Audio (MP3, rar):
Not registered yet? We'll like you more if you do!
Class CD 1
Not registered yet? We'll like you more if you do!
Class CD 2
