Περιγραφή
English for Advanced Studies for students of economics and business management is an advanced course in English designed to help students master those skills in the foreign language that will enable them to function efficiently and confidently both in the classroom and in academic or professional settings.
The material presented here is designed to be used in an advanced English course (proficiency level) for University students of Business Management and Economics. The reading texts have been carefully chosen among texts addressed to students of economics and business management to enable the readers to master business vocabulary and jargon used in such settings.
The course is divided into six chapters, each of which contains five units. The issues dealt with here refer to the environment and business enterprises, business enterprises in general, economics and statistics, globalization economics, new economic models and information technology. An effort has been made so that the material be graded according to difficulty, although some of the vocabulary in earlier units is repeated in later chapters or units for consolidating purposes.
Every unit contains a reading extract with the language varying from the formal business discourse to the less formal discourse of scientific journals. The reading tasks have been designed to test students’ comprehension and their ability to draw inferences and form conclusions by referring to particular language items. The vocabulary tasks have been so designed as to help students master structures used in common business discourses, while the emphasis lies on teaching students to systematically develop such strategies as inferring, guessing from context, reading for gist, skimming and scanning, reformulating or rephrasing and rearranging business text according to the general meaning produced. The activities are all of an advanced (proficiency) level and presuppose that students have knowledge of general English vocabulary and are at an upper-intermediate level in terms of grammar. The final section of each unit is devoted to writing, which includes topic or key sentences, summarizing, reporting, paragraph structuring and the more extended form of essay writing.
In the whole book the emphasis is more on reading and writing skills, although speaking and, to a lesser extent, listening skills are used both in the natural context of the course and in certain structured activities.
Students who follow the course systematically should develop the ability to read, understand and analyze advanced passages in economics and business management at the level of structure and vocabulary taught; understand the implications of such texts and be prepared to expose views and opinions in the target language; and, finally, recognize and present in writing both the main ideas of texts and their own ideas of business situations referring to world economics.
