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in production of organic food and has 80 stores around the country
8
. Arifoglu has its
own production facilities that Natura Siberica may or may not use for its production.
Task: the two companies have had some initial correspondence and now a face
to face meeting is required. Several points of the agreement need to be negotiated.
Natura Siberica’s owner will fly to Istanbul to meet with his new partners. The purpose
of the meeting is to make a deal acceptable to both sides, which could be the basis for
a long-term relationship.
The class will be divided into 2 teams, one team will represent Natura Siberica
and the second team will represent Arifoglu. The common task will be detailed as
follows:
Natura Siberica team has to convince their new partners to sell 25% of the
company’s shares and to proceed with a rebranding process.
Arifoglu team aims to convince their partner to sign a collaboration agreement
and to become the exclusive representative of Natura Siberica in the Turkish market.
The Case study introduction stage plays the major role in the overall teaching
process as it comprises all input information that students will use in their production.
The students are always free to look for some additional information on the internet or
use other resource for the purpose of case solving. To avoid misunderstanding of any
kind the teacher will read and examine the case thoroughly with the students. The
students will take notes, highlight relevant facts and underline key problems. The
teacher will also focus on the task that the students are to accomplish. Several key
problems have to be identified before the students start individual work.
B: Case Study Class
Guidelines: the teacher should use 20 minutes to study the background
information (Annex 1), distribute the roles. the formulation of strategy and tactics of
behavior during negotiations. The teacher shall encourage students to follow a
systematic approach to their analysis. The following questions will help them to be
consistent and follow correctly the task instructions:
8
Arifoglu [electronic resource], - Free public access, -https://www.arifoglu.com/
63
▪ What is the issue in the case study?
▪ What is the goal of the analysis?
▪ What is the context of the problem?
▪ What key facts should be considered?
▪ What alternatives are available to the decision-maker?
▪ What would you recommend — and why?
The teacher's role will be reduced to monitor and, if necessary, to assist the
teams. One of the main parts will be the students role-play involved in the case.
This not only actively engages students but forces them to really understand the
perspectives of the case characters and to visualize the situation that they need to
analyze.
C: Case Study Class Debriefing
This is the evaluation and feedback part of the class. The teacher will give
feedback on the work accomplished by students in the class. The teacher will
emphasize both communication mistakes as well as behavioral mistakes based on
differences of both teams’ cultures. The teacher will also emphasize how the target
vocabulary was used and if it helped to accomplish the tasks of the case study. In order
to motivate the students to complete the assignment the teacher should grade the
participation—both quantitatively and especially qualitatively —during the discussion
of the case. This might be a simple check, check-plus, check-minus or zero.
The class will end with an individual written task for every student: to write a
memorandum of the meeting with all points agreed to during the negotiation.
The key to success for the lesson will be that the teacher has a very clear
understanding of what the objectives of using the case study will be and a thorough
plan of the whole class.
Conclusion to Chapter III
This chapter constituted the practical part of the research. It revealed the
conclusion that innovative methods in language teaching, including case studies, may
frequently be difficult for teachers. The main conditions for successful application of
cases are the properly organized teaching activities and the professional skills of the
64
teacher in drafting a coherent and comprehensible case study. More important, is that
the teacher be not afraid to take the responsibility and adapt or better design the case
for the special needs of the learner.
By drafting a case study on a real practical situation between two existing
companies, the case presented in this chapter offers valuable teaching material that
needs to be exploited by the learners, giving to Business English learners the authority
to decide what to do to solve a real-life business problem, offering them the chance to
compete and demonstrate their analytical and managerial skills.
As argued in this chapter, the main aim of the ESP teacher is not only to teach
content, but also to improve the learners’ communication skills and case studies are
one of the tools that can develop both linguistic and extra linguistic competences.
Doing the cases learners use language naturally and in the case study method
language is both a tool to solving a problem, and also a means of communication in a
real-life business situation. By learning how to use cases more extensively, teachers
will have the possibility to make the teaching process more effective and student-
centered.
In conclusion, it can be stated that the role of case study in language education
is to try and bridge the gap between the learner’s necessities to master a special form
of a foreign language and the teacher’s abilities to teach such.
65
Conclusion
This paper aimed to take a rigorous look at Case Studies as a tool of English
for Specific Purposes and to develop a model case study for teaching Business English.
For more than 50 years of ESP courses learners’ needs have always been most relevant
and central in the practice of ESP teaching. Over time these needs have become more
complex. Today’s labour market does not resemble that of the 1990s or even 2000s.
Today employers demand more from their employees than they used to [24].
Therefore, employees who want to meet these demands have to invest more
time, money, and energy to achieve good language competence. The worldwide
demand for English has created an enormous demand for quality language teaching
and language teaching materials and resources. Learners set themselves demanding
goals and need to master English to a high level of accuracy and fluency [ibid].
This new demand is a consequence of several processes that have occurred in
those 50 years: globalization of the labour market, higher employee mobility, increased
competition, expansion of big multinational organizations, extensive use of cheap
labour, off-shoring, closer cross-border cooperation, progress in communications and
information technology, greater access to university education, and growing
unemployment, to name just a few most significant ones [ibid].
ESP teachers have to be aware of all the developments presented in this paper.
It is important to bear in mind that universities seek to employ the best ESP teachers.
Their employability is bound to increase if their qualifications in ESP teaching are
constantly upgraded and it becomes obvious that specialization in language teaching is
inevitable. Consequently, investment in professional life-long learning and
development translates into more employment opportunities.
For new ESP teachers it is strongly advised to learn the fundamentals of the
subject matter relevant to the ESP variety they want to teach. It is important to bear in
mind that such basic knowledge is always useful when teaching ESP to adults.
Looking back 50 years, it can be said that tremendous progress has been made
in all aspects of ESP teaching [23]. All the developments presented in the paper support
this view and demonstrate that the effectiveness of ESP courses has improved
66
significantly over time. ESP course-books are more interesting for learners, they offer
real-life tasks and contain many authentic texts. Frequently they are accompanied by
workbooks and skills books[ibid]. From one point of view, it makes the process of
teaching simpler for the teacher, but from another point of view, it carries extra
challenges and difficulties that the teacher has to face.
It can be concluded that all elements of the teaching/learning process (the
learner, the teacher, and teaching materials) have changed and developed over the last
years and that great progress has been made in ESP teaching. The effectiveness of ESP
courses has increased significantly; consequently, the level of language competence
and communicative competence among professionals has risen [23].
Still, there are some areas for further improvement: ESP varieties still require
intensive corpus studies for teaching purposes, the didactic relevance of teaching
materials has to be monitored and upgraded, and technology has to be widely used in
ESP teaching practice. Research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics can shed
some new light on the learning process as well. It is inevitable that more new
developments are likely to come for ESP in the future and teachers will have to keep
themselves informed and to be able to follow them [ibid.].
The paper describes several types of case studies used in teaching ESP their
typology focused on the objectives of the case study, on the complexity or subject
tackled to advance those objectives. The general theoretical literature on this subject
emphasizes more on case studies importance as a tool of teaching Business English; it
describes the characteristics of what makes a good case study and the drawbacks of
using case studies in teaching. However, it pays much less attention to the case study
framing process in general, which in my understanding is, as well, a vital part of an
effective teaching process. The aim set in this paper has been attained based on the
thorough accomplishment of the tasks supporting this aim.
The last chapter includes the empirical part where a model case study for
teaching Business English was framed and presented to be applied during the class. It
follows all principles and characteristic of a good Business English case study. It also
discusses the advantages and disadvantages for both teachers and learners when using
67
case studies for the teaching of Business English with some suggestions to redress the
drawbacks. To assume teaching using case studies is simple is an error. The use of case
studies requires a thorough investigation of different information resources, and one
may conclude that case study design and development is about creating and
researching, it requires the teacher to possess both ingenious and pragmatic skills in
order to design a good case study. In order to arrive to the best solution for the most
appropriate case study, it is not enough to have at disposal a collection of cases. It is
also necessary to understand the principles of how they can be applied.
The fundamental strength of this groundbreaking language teaching
methodology is making the classroom much more than just a formal lecture room. It
becomes a dynamic language learning center enhancing thorough interaction of all
learners’ language skills. Through this approach it has been observed that students gain
better conceptual understanding and develop analytical skills, and discernment not
derived through other language learning mediums. The impact that case studies has on
teaching and learning differs from person to person. Something that can be shown in
this research is that a teaching method that includes case studies is more effective than
the ones that do not. What most of the authors suggest is that by using case studies, the
students will be more motivated to do further studies and their hunger for more
information and knowledge increases. Due to the better skills acquisition, the students
will have a higher level of confidence and self-efficacy as long as they receive the
feedback and help that they need.
This research has practical importance as it reveals the main problems faced by
teachers when working with case studies; it also offers additional space for working on
this topic and a possibility to expand this research and investigate the best solutions to
these problems. The final thought about this study is that case studies should be used
more frequently as students seem to be interested in different learning methods that
involve discussions and problem solving. The case approach to strategic analysis is,
first and foremost, an exercise in learning by doing. Many students are more inductive
than deductive reasoners, which means that they learn better from examples than from
logical development starting with basic principles. The use of case studies can therefore
68
be a very effective classroom technique.
There are many advantages of the case study method. First of all, most students
like realistic real-life tasks. Cases require teamwork and cooperation and can be
adjusted to the level of language competence in a group of learners. Teachers have
numerous opportunities to supplement a case with new tasks, both spoken and written.
Additionally, and importantly, students know that they use the language they will need
most in real-life professional situations.
The didactic qualities of case studies include the following: – language is a tool
to perform a real-life task, – the method allows to practice all language skills with
emphasis on the productive skills of speaking and writing which are most difficult to
master, – it offers ‘learning by doing’, – it is student-centered, – speaking is more
spontaneous, – student speaking time is prolonged, – language is practiced in a natural
way (language is the means, not an end) [29].
As cases are provided with detailed information about conditions and problems
of different industries and companies, the task of analyzing company after company
and situation after situation has the twin benefit of boosting learners´ analytical skills
and exposing the learner to the ways companies and managers do things. Most college
students have limited managerial backgrounds and only fragmented knowledge about
companies and real-life strategic situations. Cases help substitute for on-the-job
experience by (1) giving broader exposure to a variety of industries, organizations, and
strategic problems; (2) forcing the student to assume a managerial role (as opposed to
that of just an onlooker); (3) providing a test of how to apply the tools and techniques
of strategic management; and (4) asking the student to come up with pragmatic
managerial action plans to deal with the issues at hand [13]. These reasons make a core
difference when choosing which teaching tool to use for teaching Business English
effectively.
Case studies may be challenging not only for the student but also for the
teacher. They require professional thinking, knowledge of certain rules and
mechanisms, as well as excellent analytical skills. Sometimes the methodology of
analyzing more complex cases may be difficult or time-consuming. It, however, should
69
not lead to eliminating case studies from ESP teaching practice, especially in teaching
English for Medicine, Law, and Business; in these content areas case studies have been
used for decades in tertiary education, and they can be equally effective in teaching
ESP [23].
The approach of teaching with cases is challenging for ESP teachers and may
require much higher qualifications, primarily, such as content knowledge and
transferable skills. While teaching with case -studies, novice teaching materials, tools
and approaches must be applied, which will help to rationalize the learners’ efforts,
save time and generally enhance the effectiveness of the teaching/learning process.
Teaching by means of case studies is a process of permanent intellectual challenge in
which teachers can learn as much as their students do.
70
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