Trump card – revisited: report on a business activity

In 2007, I was teaching business students at a small university in the central part of South Korea. The head teacher asked if I would be interested in teaching a new business English course, and gave me the freedom to design it any way I wanted. This sounded like an amazing opportunity. I knew that I wanted the course to be project-based, so I didn’t think a textbook would be appropriate, but I still needed a source of authentic input. Enter Donald Trump and his old reality TV show The Apprentice.

You’re fired!

If you search the ETp archives back to Issue 53, you can find the article I wrote about the course. If you are unable to unearth this relic from over a decade ago and are unfamiliar with the show, The Apprentice was a reality TV show where 16 candidates competed for the opportunity to be hired by billionaire Donald Trump’s organisation, working initially in teams on a series of different projects and with one member of the losing team leaving the show each week. The American version of the show ran in various iterations from 2004 until 2017, including The Celebrity Apprentice, and it inspired nearly 30 versions in other countries. You can see a ten-minute summary of the entire second season at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmhSnhNfskU.

My students and I watched one episode from Season 3 of The Apprentice each week in class and then discussed confusing vocabulary, debated the teams’ strategies for taking on the project that had been set and reviewed their teamwork (or lack of it). We also voted on which team we thought should win and who should go home from the losing team. I then assigned a similar project for the students to work on before the next class. It was a lot of work, but the students appreciated the opportunity to learn from something other than a textbook or a lecture.

Most of the projects were completed in groups, but the midterm exam was a solo product demonstration, inspired by Season 3 Episode 10, where the candidates went to Home Depot and had to put together a product demonstration for a storage locker.

The final exam was an oral interview, styled as a job interview, in which I sat down with each student individually and asked what they had learnt over the course of the term. The interview format both checked and reinforced how much the students had learnt from participating in the projects.

You’re hired!

The course was successful enough that I was able to convince my new department head to add it to the curriculum when I moved to one of Korea’s top science and technology universities in 2008, and I taught the course there for six years.

Why did it work?

I believe the course was successful for several reasons:

First, it was practical. The students engaged in projects that gave them real-world experience of working in teams, competing against one another, leading a team (the team leader role rotated), making presentations and pitching ideas. It also exposed them to business-related tasks such as planning a budget and creating a marketing campaign.

Second, the input came from a TV show. Regardless of your opinion of Donald Trump as a politician, it’s hard to argue that the TV show wasn’t entertaining. It featured real companies like Domino’s Pizza, Dove Soap and Burger King, and each week the challenges pitted two teams against each other, with one member of the losing team being ‘fired’ from the show. There was always an element of suspense.

The course evolved year by year. Some terms, the students worked in rotating teams on a different project every week. Other terms, they stayed in their team and worked on one project for the entire term, while tackling different aspects of the project week to week. One term, the students worked as individuals and designed new products, so we brought in someone from the campus startup centre to listen to their pitches and give feedback. Regardless of the format, the TV show was always used to provide authentic input and stimulate ideas for the projects.

Would I do it again?

I left full-time teaching three years ago to pursue a career as a freelance communications consultant, so I don’t teach in universities these days. However, I still believe in utilising TV shows – and reality TV shows, in particular – to help students on ESP courses. In fact, I spoke on that very topic at a recent international conference. But would I use The Apprentice again in 2019 if I were going to teach a business English class?

The answer is probably no, and there are two main reasons for this:

First, Donald Trump becoming the President of the United States in 2017 made him a different kind of public figure. His decadent lifestyle was a perfect complement to the success he was promoting to candidates on the TV show. But he is now so polarising that some students probably wouldn’t give the course a chance, based on their feelings about him as a politician.

Second, there are better options. Dragons’ Den from the UK and Shark Tank from the US are similar shows that can be used to teach business English. Although the American version ended, the British version of The Apprentice is still on the air, with multi-millionaire Alan Sugar in the Trump role, and both Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank are still filming new episodes. They show would-be entrepreneurs pitching their startups to venture capitalists, so the content could be useful for students who want to start their own businesses, a trend that is growing in popularity.

There is a great clip from Dragons’ Den showing a pitch and negotiation at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lodig6J0iMU. As you can see, the shows are both entertaining and have lots of things for students to debate and discuss.

Students need authentic input to make progress in ESP courses. One of the reasons that business English textbooks use their own audio and video recordings is that typical business phone calls and meetings involve language that is too fast and jargon-laden. One of the best things about using The Apprentice is that the same simple and direct language that helped Donald Trump make it to the White House is what made his role on the show perfect for teaching business English to second language speakers. So, if you do choose to use TV shows with your students, make sure the speaking speed and language used are appropriate for their level.

Tim Thompson taught in universities for 15 years before founding Archer Consulting in 2016. He works as a copy editor and conducts training events for government research centres, private companies and universities around the world, with a focus on professional presentation skills.

For more information, visit www.timthompsonelt.com.

archerengcon@gmail.com