Poster Presentation

Assertiveness and Sensitivity Training
through BELF Material Development

Alan Simpson
Miyazaki International College
This paper will describe Japanese chemical researchers’ overseas English needs, such as
catching what was said, verbalizing ideas, being assertive, understanding different working
styles, and building relationships. These will be compared with a literature review of business
English needs in Asia. Then, the main part of the paper will describe the development of
pre-departure training materials for staff working overseas, using project-based learning
methods, to address these needs. These materials will then be evaluated for both pedagogicaleffectiveness and transactional and relational discourse.

Needs Analysis

The author had ten years of experience working as an in-house language trainer
for a large Japanese engineering company. Some of the engineers had ongoing
English needs, depending on their business sector and strategy. For example,
there was an electro-chemical subsidiary, which had manufacturing plants
in China, Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.
Therefore, it was a common occurrence for engineers in specific roles, such assenior researchers, managers, and skilled maintenance operators (e.g., welders)to visit these plants and for foreign partners to visit their plant for meetings andmanufacturing quality audits. Another example was a pharmaceutical company,
which was trying to set-up collaborative production facilities in India and develop
a distribution network through Taiwan into China.
The aim of this study was to better understand the trainees’ needs so thattraining materials could be developed. Furthermore, this material development
framework could be applied to other contexts. Fourteen Japanese chemical,201Simpson

pharmaceutical, and electro-chemical researchers were asked open-ended
questions via email about their overseas work experience. They had varying
experiences ranging from being based in India for over a year, to frequently
visiting customers in China or Europe. Generally, when researchers reach overthirty years old, they gain more responsibility in their work and therefore havemore opportunity to travel overseas to maintain and develop their company’smarkets. In this case, six researchers, or 43%, responded to the survey. The mostdifficult things for these researchers to function in overseas business are shownin Table 1.
These needs were then compared to some Asian-based English as a Businesslingua franca (BELF)1 studies, as summarized in Table 2.
By comparing the perceived needs of the Japanese researchers withother Asian BELF studies, the common needs realized included listening
comprehension of various accents and monitoring understanding; being able
to adapt written and spoken speech appropriateness for each situation; dynamic
interaction skills; and cross-cultural awareness. These common needs were thenused to develop specific skills through focused task- and project-based activities.
Table 1
Overseas Researcher Difficulties
Catching what was said because of speed, blending words, pronunciation, and changes in topic
Concerns over sentence construction and misunderstandings, so minutes and follow-up emails
were often used
Different working styles, such as giving results first and then explaining things, or vice versa
Building relationships and trust
Being assertive
Managing unexpected events
Understanding expectations

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Assertiveness and Sensitivity Training, OnCUE Journal, 11(2), pages 201-210
Table 2BELF Literature ReviewJapanese construction workers in Hong Kong used pronouns, like ‘we’, backchannels, vagueness,hedges and modality (Handford & Matous, 2011). Japanese business people were indirect,
shifted topics, used hedging, and were reactive to maintain harmony and group consensus,
more so than being proactive or independent (Du-Babcock & Tanaka, 2013).
Thai civil engineers and Taiwanese semi-conductor engineers had a higher priority on
reading technical texts and writing reports but as careers progress there was more need forunderstanding accented English and oral communication (Kaewpet, 2009; Spence & Liu,2013) .
Malaysian chemical engineers had a need for oral communication for teleconferences,
networking, and presenting (Kassim & Ali, 2010).
Bangalore IT staff needed writing skills to clarify, structure, and summarize, but understanding
accents and switching between direct and indirect language was more important (Nickerson,2009).
Filipino call center staff had difficulty linking American callers’ purpose to the service theyneeded because they had poor interaction skills and there were breakdowns in cultural
understanding (Forey & Lockwood, 2007).
Hong Kong’s finance, tourism, trading and professional service sector staff switched from direct
to indirect speech, but needed more pragmatic interruption skills, mutually understandable
accents, and to be able to monitor cultural understanding (Warren, 2014).

Material Development

The reason for using a project-based learning framework, for these specificstudents and any additional general future applications, is to utilize the 21stcentury skills of critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, andcross-cultural fluency (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). There are two kinds of tasks
employed: creative with post-task feedback, and explicit skill-based activities,
such as phonetic listening comprehension to address accent comprehension
weaknesses. In addition, the tasks encourage students to demonstrate discourse
leadership by giving opinions before less capable peers, paraphrasing the context,
and asking focused questions to build collaborative group talk. Furthermore, tobecome more sensitive to other people’s interaction skills a small talk activity
has been developed where students can monitor talk, prolonged silences,203

Simpsoninappropriate responses, lack of uptake, and minimal responses (Kaur, 2015).
A holistic framework for evaluating business English materials has beenused for measuring the effectiveness of the proposed needs analysis, learning
objectives, methodology, naturalness of the language models, contextualizationof the language, and learner autonomy (Chan, 2009). This framework has also
been applied to evaluate discourse features, such as transactional and relationaltalk, strategies, formality, structure, and cultural differences.

Task-Based Simulations

This section will show how the steps or tasks build on each other and make astory for the trainees to follow into a complete project life cycle, from simulating
the setting up of a meeting, to going and having the meeting and then after themeeting tasks, when trainees have returned back to their office. After this section,
the evaluation will draw together the purpose of the tasks with the reasoning forintegrating them.

Set-upThe scenario, which matches the students’ work context, is to develop overseas
pharmaceutical product distribution in China. The first task is for the students
to take ownership of creating a storyboard for (a) scheduling, (b) meeting, and(c) follow-up activities. Then, they need to actually set up the meeting in China
by email, with another student pretending to be the customer. However, after
the arrangements have been made, the meeting has to be rescheduled for a muchearlier date to coincide with another appointment in China (simulating realisticcircumstances). After the task is completed, email structuring, modal verbs, andunderstanding imposition are taught.

Listening

The next activity is to improve the students’ Chinese-English listening skills. An
authentic listening sample was chosen from Badger (2011), featuring a ChineseEnglish voicemail about a problem with the airport pick-up, which matches theproject theme. Next, the students have to identify Chinese-English pronunciation
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features, as shown in Table 3. Then, they have to practice using those features tomake their own sentences and read them to a partner.
Effective repair techniques are taught post-task, focusing on repetition andparaphrasing, to develop discourse management skills.

Meetings

The students then prepare for the meeting with the simulated Chinese customer
by reading Table 4.
Before the role play, the students are given time to create their characters, andafter the role play the audience is encouraged to ask questions to further develop
the characters. Examples of such question topics include finding out how longthey have been with the company, what their position is, how they feel about thisproject, how they feel about working together, and what they like to do in their
free time. The purpose is to realize what the role players’ values are.
The next stage is to give a project update to the Chinese partner and persuade
them to try a new idea, as shown in Table 5.
Table 3Chinese L1 Influenced Phonetic Changes
An example Chinese sentence
Simplified

Wha are-e yimpotan popetees ov contag rens?
What are the important properties of a contact lens?

Patterns?
Your basic sentenceYour Chinese sentence

Table 4
Meeting Role PlayYou are a Japanese researcher. Your productis very good quality but expensive. You havesome older products which are cheaper, but
don’t have as good functionality.

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You are the Chinese customer. The Japaneseproduct is good but too expensive, so youwant a cheaper product. Chinese products aremuch cheaper.

Simpson
Table 5Persuasion Role PlayYour Japanese product is better. It will cut
their manufacturing time. Even though it
is more expensive, you only need half thequantity, because it is more efficient.

You are the Chinese manager, but you do
not trust the Japanese product, or staff. Why
should you change products?

The role players prepare and are told to take notes during the discussion,
because they will need them later. The audience again participates by asking
questions post-role play. This is not problem solving but rather trying tounderstand why the role players act in a certain way. This enables reflective
learning for the audience as well as experiential learning for the role players.

Turn-Taking Dynamics

The next task is to raise awareness of turn-taking power dynamics by showing
three transcripts. The transcripts are modelled on Angouri’s (2010) authentictranscripts, taken from real samples. However, they have been adapted toexemplify the power dynamics in this particular context. The first shows thespeakers are equals because there is overlap and lots backchanneling. The second
shows the speakers have different statuses but all within the same company, so
there is overlap but a lack of backchannels and hesitation devices, and there is
no monopolizing conversation. The third shows equal status managers fromdifferent companies meeting for the first time. There is roundtable discussion but
still some overlap showing natural turn taking interaction.

Socializing

The next simulation is going out for dinner with the customer. First, the students
have to consider their status and whether it is appropriate to overlap and talk atthe same time. Then, they have to conduct a short small talk conversation, helping
each other to get involved in the discussion. After the task, explicit feedback isgiven on more active discourse skills, such as the following:• Talking first, paraphrasing into easier, more specific questions, so that it iseasier to make matched responses• Making sure everyone has a turn to talk, and summarizing for group206

Assertiveness and Sensitivity Training, OnCUE Journal, 11(2), pages 201-210

comprehension (especially useful when someone joins the conversation
later)• Monitoring talk, prolonged silences, inappropriate responses, lack ofuptake, and minimal responses, and then being able to respond to them
• Mimicking others’ communicative styles
The task is repeated, encouraging students to also smoothly bridge to newtopics.

Wrap-upIn the final task, the students have to use their notes to write a follow-up email
to their customer. This involves summarizing and checking the meeting action
points, with peer and instructor feedback on structural cohesion.

Material Evaluation

Using Chan’s (2009) Business English textbook evaluation criteria for material
pedagogy, it was found that the above tasks suit the learners’ English level, theirwork need and interest, with relevant content. The tasks encourage generativegrammar and vocabulary usage, supported by authentic audio samples andrealistic transcripts. This results in a more integrated project, focusing on accent
training, structured writing, and dynamic and effective interaction. At the sametime, there is explicit pronunciation training and discourse management training
in the small talk activity. Shared scenario building encourages task ownership,
and audience participation supports critical thinking and experiential learning.
However, there are no specific details of how to teach notetaking skills nor how
to give discourse management feedback, and these ideas should be developed
further.
Regarding material discourse, there is transactional and relational talkwith scenarios encouraging adaptation of functional and situational language.
Learners are sensitized to different levels of formality, although politeness,
openings and closings, bridging topics, and topic management should also be
explicitly taught. Similarly, cultural differences are only explored through accentvariety awareness and role play character contrasts. However, to be able to207

Simpsonaccommodate and adapt to these differences, more extensive training is required.

Conclusion

There is a need for pedagogical materials which address real ESP needs. Therefore,
it is important to further develop these materials, coach students using them,refine them, and then be able to adapt a similar training material template toother contexts.

Notes

1. The term English as a Business lingua franca (BELF), was first used byLouhiala-Salminen, Charles, and Kankaanranta (2005) in their landmark
study of how English was used as a lingua franca between members of staff
involved in a Nordic corporate merger. Furthermore, they described how thelanguage was shaped by the different business cultures.

References

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SimpsonWarren, M. (2014). “Preparation is everything”: Meetings in professional
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Author bio

Alan Simpson was the English Program Coordinator for a Japanese engineering
company for nearly a decade, before becoming a lecturer at Miyazaki International
College. He is also the coordinator and has supported the growth of the JALT BusinessCommunication SIG. alanmarksimpson@gmail.com
Received: October 1, 2017
Accepted: November 11, 2018210