What are they?
- They take place in boardrooms, offices, corridors, restaurants, dorm rooms, online, on trains, planes, busses… name a location and they’ve probably happened there.
- They generally last somewhere between 3 minutes and several days.
- Participants might stand up, sit down, wear suits, jeans, pajamas, baseball hats, piercings etc and they generally range in age from around 15 -100 or so.
- Participants might have power and status rankings of 0-100 that don’t necessarily correlate with their age.
The answer is business meetings, of course. And something interesting that we know from speech data is that business meetings are generally littered with small talk at any stage of the discussion, which can be about… well, anything.
So all in all, business meetings are rather hard to pin down. But communicating successfully in meetings is crucial for most of my students so I wanted to have a stab at making a short series of ELT videos about them. I reasoned that there would probably be three things that would resonate with many learners…
- Time would be limited
- The discussion would be purposeful
- Making yourself understood and understanding would be paramount.
We were able to shoot some of the scenes in the YouTube studios in NYC with a splendid cast of volunteers. I’m very grateful to them and here is the first in the series which is about time management…
And here’s the second one which is about making decisions:
And here’s the third and final one which is about understanding
Many thanks to our cast of stars: Michelle Kaplan, Breahne Dolan, Joy Chu and Kathy Fagan.
Check out more of their work here:
Michelle – All Ears English http://www.allearsenglish.com – a terrific podcast for English learners – great for advanced conversational English and IELTS preparation.
Kathy – English teachers will love Kathy’s reflections on ELT at her Free-Range ELT blog. Check it out here: http://www.freerangekef.blogspot.com
Breahne is model as well as an actress and you can find out more about her work here: https://www.facebook.com/BreahJadeModel