THE ROLE OF THE BUSINESS ENGLISH TEACHER AS A BUILDER OF INTERCULTURALLY COMPETENT AND EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT CITIZENS

Do Business English (BE) teachers need to rethink their role in a world where “global citizen”, “intercultural competence” and “emotional intelligence” are the new buzzwords?
Teaching business English to a group of learners may mean that a new English-speaking community is created, a community of practice. This micro-community is emotionally intelligent, accepting and assimilating the “functional aspects of its members’ commonalities and differences without stifling their unique identities.” (Hogstaad, 2009) Thus business English teachers must create a “caring and nurturing learning community, helping students build powerful identities that would eventually improve their relationship to the world and their opportunities. According to Daniel Goleman (1996), emotional literacy and competence contribute not only to rejecting stereotypes and respecting differences, but also to improving professional achievement. Learning not only business English but also how to manage emotions and relationships, business students will be equipped with tools that facilitate communication by identifying similarities and building common ground.
Since, from a discursive perspective, students’ identities are built by their experiences in the learning community and the social context, their behaviour and discourse are conditioned by their internalised beliefs about self. Therefore, developing learners’ communication skills (especially their speaking skills) may improve the way they relate to the world. However, a challenge to this approach is the assessment of students’ skills that proves to be difficult by means of traditional methods. They may indicate the level of skills and abilities’ acquisition but they fail to give any insight into the learners’ power relation to the English language and its speakers.
Briefly tackling the topic of English as Business Lingua Franca, the paper discusses whether today’s global issues should or should not be considered in BE training programmes that focus on creating “emotionally intelligent learning communities” (Hoogstad, 2009).