Website: www.e4b.de

I am a freelance trainer, teacher trainer, and author based in Berlin, Germany, and specializing in business English and ESP. I’ve been working in this field for around 20 years—before that I was an engineering officer in the British Army. (In fact my first real experience as a trainer was when I became an army rock-climbing instructor, but that’s another story). Soon after I moved into TESOL I received an LCCI Diploma in Teaching Business English at London Guildhall University, and followed it up with a master’s in English for specific purposes at Aston University. Since then, most of my experience has been in teaching English for business purposes in a corporate training environment, but nowadays I don’t spend that much time actually teaching.

To give you an idea, in the last 3 months I have run a couple of intensive seminars for language learners, focusing on specific language needs, but I have also run several teacher training workshops; worked on a second edition of a textbook called English for Accounting; written a series of language training worksheets for a large IT company; worked as a consultant for Pearson; and given presentations at conferences in Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I hardly do any work in Berlin, other than writing. Since 2002, I have published around 20 textbooks for various ELT publishers, as well as developed several in-house courses at different companies. I suppose the book I am most proud of is a methodology book called How to Teach Business English (Pearson, 2005), which is used in teacher training all over the world.

I think this variety is what I love most about our profession. Yes, there are specialists who focus on one or two areas of academic research, but there are also many of us who work across the various disciplines and really need to put all the study to practical use. I guess that’s why they call it “applied.” And what we do is important.

For example, this week a client called me to discuss a course for a group of German managers who need English to work in China. To prepare for the call I found myself dipping into research on communication styles, intercultural rhetoric, miscommunication in business meetings, and world Englishes. I also needed to be aware of a whole range of issues from teaching methodology and learning styles to the corporate training environment and accountability. What we were doing was planning an intervention that would influence how real people in the real world go about their daily lives, how they communicate with one another, how they build relationships, and how they work together. It would also potentially affect the bottom line of the company. These sorts of conversations always remind me that working in this field is a real privilege as well as a genuine responsibility. And I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

Evan Frendo can be contacted via his blog at http://englishfortheworkplace.blogspot.de/.