B2 – Corporate jargon

I was always a little bit afraid of teaching Business English, as my main focus had usually been on exam preparation and General English. However, as it normally is with me and my blog posts, more BE students = focus shift to the business side of English. The idea for this class came up as a joke, initially poking fun at convoluted ways of speaking at corporate meetings. This later evolved into a BE lesson plan aimed at B2-level corporate students to let them relax and laugh at their daily meetings full of mysterious phrases that bring lots of confusion and very little substance to the meetings.

If you have students who are currently employed or with a corporate past, they will definitely appreciate this lesson. It brings a lot of new vocabulary while refreshing some classic and well-known idioms often used at office meetings. At the end of the class, students should leave with many new phrases, which hopefully will make their future gatherings easier to understand and follow.

You can find the presentation, the worksheet, and the teacher’s notes at the end of the post.

My classes typically start with a discussion. However, this time is a bit different. With the help of the ChatGPT, I created a classic corporate email that students may be familiar with. Give them some time to read and understand it. Follow this reading with some questions about the content of this message. The trick is that the email is written using corporate vocabulary, which makes it enigmatic for non-corporate workers. Still, give it a go – read the message below and think what it is about.

Subject: Q4 Progress Update

Hello Team,

I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to share a quick update on how things are going in Q4.

Our recent PPC campaign is performing well, and our SEO rankings are improving. The CRM team is working on integrating our customer data with our ERP system for better management, and we have some UX/UI improvements in the pipeline to enhance our customer experience.

If you have any questions or want to discuss these updates, please reach out.

Best regards,

Mark

Once you decode the message, discuss its meaning and decypher the acronyms. Surely, some of them are quite common, and students should be familiar with them. Predict the meaning of the ones that students have never seen before. Give them some more time to think about other acronyms and phrases they often use in their offices and the context in which they are used. Afterwards, reveal the meaning of acronyms and ask to match them to their definitions.

This lesson is quite heavy on vocabulary, therefore I wanted to include some speaking before getting into the video and learning even more phrases. Start by letting them share their experiences. Ask students about the typical office jargon they hear in their companies and whether they think they are proficient at it. Before watching the video, ask if corporate language facilitates or rather hinders communication. Elicit some ideas from different students and compare the answers.

I was looking for a short and straightforward video on what corporate workers sound like when I finally found just what I needed – a promotional video of the Zoom Phone by Tripp and Tyler, titled What Corporate People Sound Like. It is a fast-paced video with a plethora of office jargon, which will hold students’ attention for its whole duration.

Once again, using ChatGPT, I pasted the transcript from the video and removed the timestamps to obtain a clean dialogue. I also asked it to identify all corporate jargon expressions used in the text, and ChatGPT did not disappoint. I was quickly presented with a list of 42 corporate terms squeezed into this 2-minute-long video! The first watch concentrates on understanding the content of the conversation and identifying some of the corporate jargon. As the conversation appears to be about nothing, I asked ChatGPT to help me with this task, and according to it, the dialogue “seems to be about discussing and planning for a business-related issue, likely related to a quarterly forecast or business strategy”, whatever that means.

Play the video once again, this time while looking at the transcript. I removed thirteen office jargon items, making sure they were spaced out to make the process of simultaneous listening and writing as simple as possible. Some of the terms are circle back, win-win, and pick your brain. Check the answers and elicit their meaning. Ask students to identify and underline the other 29 phrases.

The next task is about matching eight more phrases to their definitions. As there are still a lot of other expressions, students can work in pairs and match them together. The last task is a combination of gap-fill and speaking. Students complete three questions with appropriate corporate jargon and compare their answers in pairs. Monitor the activity and provide speaking feedback. Since at the end of the lesson, there are still 18 phrases left, you can set it as homework to write down their definitions and use in sentences.

I was on the fence about my last activity. I wanted to do either a short writing, circling back to the first task – a corporate email filled with corporate jargon, or a short role-play. I ultimately decided that a role-play would be a bit more appropriate as an email can also be assigned as homework. Tell students to imagine that some of the employees have been experiencing a decline in morale and productivity. Each student receives five (or more) phrases learnt in this class. They need to discuss the issue and find the solution while using the jargon. The first person to correctly use all vocabulary items wins! If you teach in person, you could also print out and cut out all the phrases and randomise this activity by picking the expressions and using them in a discussion. The person with the most expressions used is the winner!

If you enjoyed the idea for this class, feel free to download the files below.

How do you feel about the corporate jargon? Are you familiar with it? Do you think it facilitates or hinders efficient communication?