Observations on TESL in the corporate world

Teaching English has gained business critical importance in India. Right from call centers and BPOs that need English for customer service to software engineers that aim to improve their communication skills for smoother internal communication, English trainers are in great demand. In most cases, it’s spoken English communication that is clearly the requirement, and communicative (and functional) English has gained an edge over other methods of teaching English. However, it has also led to an attitudinal shift: communicative or functional English is the only appropriate way of teaching English and all other methods (the usually scowled-at structural method, for example) are ways of the ignorant. In this writeup, I will summarize my thoughts regarding TESL needs of the corporate world and the impact they have on training, as well as review TESL methods and their usefulness for various learning needs. A word of caution: this is not a research article and will not use any statistically relevant data to justify observations or claims. However, I believe a practitioner’s observations are important as qualitative data and have empirical value.

TESL needs of companies

Companies need TESL for various reasons:

Accent training: Because of the ever-growing number of call centers, accent (neutralization) training is the buzz word. If you run a search on job portals for language trainers, these jobs outnumber other language-training related jobs.

Sales-related training: Because most call centers also require their customer-service representatives (CSRs) to make sales call to their customers, using language for sales is also an important TESL area, rather an ESP area. This is also relevant for writing customer emails.
Cross dialectal training: As CSRs deal with customers that speak a different dialect of English, it’s not enough to work on their accent. They need to understand what will make the customer receptive to their speech, and one of the ways is making sure you say it the way the customer would. As a result, how to talk to an American or a British or an Australian customer is an integral part of language training these days.

Developing intermediate spoken and written communication skills: This requirement is mostly for internal customers. For all customer-facing communication, employees are hired after testing their entry-level language skills and trainability in the context of the training timelines. However, for internal-facing communication, some compromises are made. For example, given the number of software engineers required these days, asking for high entry-level communication skills will impact hiring and scalability negatively. Then, the tread-off is living with below-par communication skills to begin with and providing language training as you go. Though this impacts business, the scale is not huge, and because this is internal, it does not affect the brand of the company, and therefore, not business critical. This is why, most times, motivation is low in such programs and takeaways not enough. For example, it impacts the learner motivation when this training is provided for their offshore deployment.

As can be seen, the focus is mostly on spoken communication. Also, in case of both spoken and written skills, the most important challenge for training is scalability: how to train more people using less resources and, more importantly, in shorter time. Obviously, the shift is then towards using more and more “canned” responses: giving employees stock responses for opening and closing interactions, for handling frustration, for getting the customer interested. This directly minimizes the importance of TESL for developing holistic language skills. TESL in the corporate world is more of TESP. This impacts everything: syllabus and program design; delivery platform; teaching methodology; and assessment of trainees, trainers, as well as the program. Let’s now take a look at how each of these four is affected by the requirements.

Syllabus and Program Design

While choosing skills to be taught in a program, it’s important to pragmatically outline the target skill set, compare that with the entry-behavior skills set, and determine teaching areas. For example, if the focus is on selecting candidates with zero MTI, including MTI reduction in the syllabus is unnecessary. The problem a syllabus designer faces is how to generalize language skills sets, how to ensure new hires have the expected skills, and how to deal with the realities of training that in spite of setting hiring standards and procedures, a group of trainees cannot be homogenous in terms of language training needs. At the same time, keeping the training challenge in mind, it’s imperative to include as few areas as possible to keep the program short. This forces syllabus designers to take the nonholistic approach and line up skills that are disconnected because of the lack of bridging skills.

At the same time, the program becomes a mix and match of several pieces that look more idiosyncratic than a plan. For example, teaching participants only rolling r’s and the interdentals leaves out several sounds like the dipthongs, creates an incorrect impression that these are the only differences in the phonetic inventories being contrasted, and leads to some myths like “there isn’t much difference between Indian and other Englishes.”

However, this is a tread-off for supporting scalability and teaching principally correct things isn’t the priority.

Delivery platform

Whether to use elearning or trainer-fronted delivery is another crucial decision training departments have to make. Both have their pluses and minuses, and a blended approach seems to work well in most cases. However, trainer-led sessions appear to be more popular with participants. The most important reason for this could be the familiarity with the mode. For spoken communication, in spite of the technological development in language laboratories, trainer-fronted delivery seems to work better. That may be because of the real time and customized feedback that trainees get, as well as the impact it has on learning time. Moreover, the elearning packages that are available usually do not succeed in keeping candidates interested as a long-term training program. The trainer can customize the degree to difficulty of the contents based on the composition of a group, which is very difficult for elearning programs to handle.

Teaching methodology

This is an area that is in line with modern TESL research. Most departments these days use the communicative or the functional approach. However, I think it will be useful to review how this method can be used for the purposes of training needs outlined at the beginning of this article.

Accent training

Accent training is directly influenced by the communicative approach for obvious reasons. However, how it is applied can have different results and will address different needs. For example, using conversations with an emphasis on pronunciation can help place sounds in a context and teach phonetic phenomena like contractions. However, if employees are hired with an acceptable handle on spoken Indian English, contractions or similar phenomena are mostly already learned. What matters is making participants aware of different sounds and practice these sounds. Apparently, a blend of the structural and the communicative approach will work better rather than just the communicative approach. Giving an inventory of different sounds, describing the place and manner of articulation, demonstrating the sound production (maybe, using animation), and creating exercises for practicing these sounds will be the contribution of the structural method. On the other hand, getting employees simulate customer service situations without scripted dialogues, making them monitor their own pronunciation, and giving feedback on it will be the contribution of the communicative method. There is a contention that it’s difficult for learners to understand rules and technical description. However, we are not talking about school-going children or foreign language learners. We are talking about graduates with acceptable academic records and at least an intermediate-level proficiency in English, and who are intelligent enough to handle complex analytical tasks. Undermining this audience seems unreasonable and unnecessary. Also, any practitioner can tell that it’s faster to give rules to a mature audience and leave it to them to practice the rules and come back for feedback than use methods like the direct method and immersion programs and wait for learning to “happen.” This is also a resource-effective way. By shifting the onus on the participants to practice rules, trainer time is saved, allowing a trainer to support more participants. Additionally, as practicing material taught in a class becomes a job responsibility of the participants and leads to better motivation and improved performance. Gist: The structural method seems to be best suited for teaching and the communicative method for practice.


Sales-related training

The focus on sales-related training is on identifying generic situations and creating scripts to support CSRs. Though this is the most efficient way to save time and be consistent, it also assumes that scripts can replace the need for having command over the structure of English for customer-service situations. This is an exaggerated claim and most times, dips in quality are because of this assumption. Though customer service training calls for ESP, customer interaction cannot always be controlled and will need language skills beyond the scope of the scripts provided. Therefore, even after taking the ESP approach, the need for holistic communication skills cannot we weeded out. If we decide to address holistic needs, taking the direct-method or communicative English approach will be easy for the learners but will be time-intensive, and will have fewer takeaways. Gist: Holistic training needs cannot be neglected, and to address these needs, the structural method is the faster route.

Cross dialectal training

Cross dialectal training is mostly looked at as lexical level training dealing with different words, idioms, etc. However, this is a myth and there certainly are differences on the syntactic level that need to be taught. For example, a subjunctive/jussive construction is very common in American English while because of its less currency in Indian English, many Indian English speakers treat it ungrammatical. To teach this construction, some grammatical concepts have to be established for easier understanding and application. Gist: Structural method will work for this kind of training as well.

Developing intermediate spoken and written communication skills

These needs are purely TESL needs with participants that mostly have been to vernacular schools. Using the communicative/functional approach of TESL again will ask for a lot of time commitment. Time is a premium for employees, especially for add-on training like this, and there have to be concrete takeaways, more concrete than “practice talking” and “read books.” Also, it may simply reinforce the incorrect structures because even if the teachers correct a structure in a particular interaction, there is no guarantee the participant has understood and acquired the structure. Gist: The structural method is more suitable for these training needs.

Assessment of trainees, trainers, and training

Assessing the trainees is easy as long as the deliverables are clearly defined at the outset. If the trainees achieve the objectives, the training is successful, irrespective of the method of delivery and teaching.

However, the assessment of trainers and training needs a different approach keeping in mind that most companies need ESP. Language trainers are notorious for low-value digressions and philosophizing. I worked with a trainer who, while teaching candidates various currencies used in America, used three hours to talk about the concept of money, how it evolved from a stone to a coin to a bill, and the stock market, and the value of money in the life of a human being. It took a protest from the participants to change the trainer. Agreed that this may be a one-off case. However, inconsequential digressions can distract learners and there are better way of making classes interesting. An ESP trainer needs to work within the usage area defined by the syllabus.

In case of program designs, there is a possibility of an ESP program trying to strike a balance between holistic and specific needs. However, the specific needs have to clearly take priority and holistic skills have to be included as complementary.

Conclusion

The communicative or functional English approach is primarily useful for teaching English as a medium of survival communication, which is not always the training requirement. Also, communicative or functional English approach is useful for the beginner or the intermediate level but in the corporate world, you have advanced learners to teach as well. An advanced learner who already speaks a dialect very well will be resistant to accepting what they use as incorrect and a different structure correct, just because the trainer says so and will push for a reasoning, which is most times not the case at the beginner or the intermediate level. However, in general, we need beginner or intermediate level seond/foreign language programs most often and have come to limit language teaching to these areas alone. Additionally, it’s not true that even at these levels, learners will run away from rules and will not benefit from them. It’s a matter of how you present the rules and how you make your learners understand that these rules will help them speak/write better. As I said earlier, a blend of the communicative and structural method is the ideal solution. However, the myth that we have created that to teach communicative English, a trainer need not understand structural English is a convenient escape route for trainers that do not want to invest in learning the language as a mechanism, so they can teach their learners better.