This semester

This semester is 15 sessions long. There will be no class on 01 April 2014 (also known as April Fools’ Day ) as I will be in the UK at a conference of English Language Teachers.
There will also be an Easter Holiday break of two weeks as well.

Plans

The plan is to finish the current book Basis for Business B1 by Carole Eilertson and Mike Hogan doing Units 8 to 10 plus lots of extra material too.

I do try to update the webpages here quite regularly so keep checking them out.

The warm up

We warmed up by considering the cold weather we had had recently

Unit 8

We started to look at Unit 8 of the book and the theme is a trade fair and virtually everyone had been to one at sometime in their lives.
We considered what would be needed if our company wanted to have a stand at a trade show and thought of these:

• information and brochures
• posters pictures of the products and roll-up banners
• gifts, give-aways (also written giveaways) or freebies
• a COFFEE machine that works!
• snacks for the people working on the stand
• sample products (if they fit)
• lots of business cards
• furniture (chairs, desks, boards etc.)
• video equipment (a projector, screen or television
• name badges
• marketing and sales staff to operate the stand.

We also considered what sort of things we would offer as a freeby

• caps or hats
• mugs or beakers
• lanyard for your keys
• towels
• sweets (or candy if you are in the USA)
• ball-point pens
• bags
• USB sticks
• anything with the company logo on it

We then looked at exercise 2 and after some discussion where we considered the “Sherlock Holmes Principle”: we think the answers are as follows:

When we considered an ecological product we felt we needed to clarify three words:

• organic
• fair trade
• ecological

Homework

For the new people they need to get the book.

Everyone needs to look at the vocabulary in the small book and read through the next part of the Unit in preparation for next week.