Russell Stannard recommends some sites that business English teachers will find useful.
Grammar and vocabulary
www.better-english.com/exerciselist.html
This is a great starting point. Go to this site and you are immediately given a list of areas such as grammar, collocations and multi-word verbs. Simply click on the one that interests you and you will be taken to a separate list of exercises (there are also some very good business English crosswords). Most of the exercises offer instant feedback. The site is free and easy to navigate.
http://lc.byuh.edu/CNN_N/CNN-N.html
This site offers supplementary material for a TV broadcast that CNN makes to schools around the world in English. It is free and students don’t need to watch the programmes to do, and get benefit from, the exercises here. Feedback is instant and there is plenty of material. This is organised by the dates of university terms (the site is run by Brigham Young University). Just click on Exercises or Vocabulary and then choose a date and you will get a list of exercises. Not everything is business based, but much of it is.
This site is also free. When you open it, you will see a list of dropdown menus, eg Reading, Grammar and Vocabulary. There are some interesting reading articles; they don’t have accompanying comprehension questions as such (you could make up your own), but they do have exercises on the meanings of words within the text. Checking answers to the grammar exercises can be a little slow as you have to check each item individually.
Writing
Finding material for writing practice on the internet is always a problem as it is difficult to get anything the students write checked and corrected. I have looked for tips and ideas to give to students plus model answers which they can look at. There are hundreds of sites available, but these are a few I think are worth looking at.
http://content.monster.com/resume/samples/thankyou/ Here you will find a really handy set of example letters with lots of useful business vocabulary included. The only problem is that they only deal with one topic – saying thank you, though there are plenty of different contexts. http://englishplus.com/grammar/letrcont.htm There are some good tips on writing business letters here. http://www.stpt.usf.edu/pms/intro.html I have found this site pretty useful. It provides information about punctuation, with lots of examples and explanations. Try it and find out how to use a colon and a semi-colon properly
Listening
I suggest trying some of the BBC sites. Students can listen and read at the same time and all the articles are contemporary. Not all are business related, but most are. You need a Real Player plug-in to listen to the news items, but it can be downloaded directly from the site and I find downloading the actual listenings is very quick, even though I only have a slow connection. www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/news/index.shtml This offers some of the latest articles from the World Service, all with written text and the facility to hear them read aloud. There is help with vocabulary, quizzes, a special section for business English and also a large archive of previous material. www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/inthenews/ This is another part of the BBC site (not part of the World Service) which provides a lot of their English listening material. Again, topics are contemporary and often have a business flavour. There are quizzes accompanying every article and a large resource bank of previous articles and quizzes.
Link sites
These are sites that are mainly useful for the links they provide to other sites.
www.bized.ac.uk/ Keep in mind that the site is not designed specifically for ELT students, but it does cater for younger learners and much of the material would be appropriate. You will need to do quite a lot of searching, but there are plenty of articles to read and interesting activities for students to do at home, such as searches and mazes. http://eleaston.com/biz/bizhome.html This useful link site has a lot of material and it is nicely divided into categories. It has other sections apart from business English. www.wfi.fr/volterre/businessenglish.html This is another good starting point for using the internet with business classes. One of its features is a good list of links to online magazines and newspapers which you can use in class.
Webquests
www.wagner-juergen.de/englisch/quests.htm
This is a site with simple webquests, which your students can use at home or in class. A webquest is like a quiz on the internet. In the more complicated versions, students have to go to various sites to try to answer a range of questions. The ones here are quite simple as the questions only require them to visit one particular site, though they will have to search through the various pages of the site to find all the answers. Many of them involve visits to company websites where they will find information about particular industries or company histories. The questions for each webquest can be printed out and given to the students. I recently gave out the first one, which is on the history of McDonalds, as homework and was amazed to find that ten out of the 13 students had done it and really enjoyed it.
Russell Stannard is a senior lecturer in ICT and multimedia at the University of Westminster. He has an extensive publishing background in ELT and is currently working with BBC Worldwide on various CD ROMs, and with Macmillan Hong Kong on a primary course. He also teaches English and Spanish at Sutton Adult Education College, UK.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 29, October