Business English Teaching In Vocational Institute

Traditional business teaching depends on teacher's explanation to the vocabulary, sample sentences and specimen letters. It ignores the students' needs analysis and pays a lot of attention on the ageing knowledge of the course books. Therefore, we need to look for new approaches and materials to obtain satisfactory teaching effects.The fast-developing IT technology has deeply influenced people's idea and behavior and also motivated teaching revolution in many aspects. This paper aims to explore and discuss the problems of teaching Business English, especially business writing in light of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) theories, language learning and cognitive theories.As Business English falls into the category of ESP which is one branch of ELT (English Language Teaching), they share the basic theory and research method. Students learn language mainly in the purpose of communication. In order to communicate with others effectively and efficiently, they must possess not only linguistic competence but also communicative competence. Students cannot attain communicative competence through passive learning since the competence is a kind of ability, which can not be taught, of using the language appropriately. They must actively take knowledge, connect it to previously assimilated knowledge and make it theirs by constructing their own interpretation.This paper analyzes the register, style and contextual aspects of E-mail which has evidently changed business writing in practice and therefore challenged our teaching in material and method.To explore new teaching approach, two examples of computer-basedBusiness English Teaching experiment are presented in detail. The section of Multimedia in BET remarks the software in classroom, electronic dictionary and describes a coursebook-related program, which can be used in a language course either as tools in preparing and running lessons or sources of additional input for the development of skills. Internet-based BET experiment is a good example of students' construction of communicative competence as it provides authentic materials and communication tools for the students to experience their knowledge interpretation.Although computer-based BET has its merits, it is only one trial among many options. It is hoped that the experiments described in this paper will provide other teachers with some idea for developing their methods to promote BET.