Abstract:

The course of Business English aims at helping future specialists to use English in their habitual professional life. Nowadays teachers use a wider range of techniques in the process of study. Thus, educational games become more popular as they teach students to set goals and rules, adapt to new situations and people, solve problems and interact with each other.

The advantages of Business games are unquestionable. They answer the professional needs of students, students are safe from any risks in case they make some wrong business decisions, the games prepare players for an interaction in the professional sphere and remove all psychological barriers. Why do teachers so often fail to reach the desired effect?
It is necessary to distinguish role plays and case studies as they have their own peculiarities, aims, role in the process of study and methods of conducting them.

Role games aim at mastering professional skills of business communication. The students are given roles and instructions on a set of activities to reach the goal. But even with role plays’ seeming simplicity, teachers should remember the following:
1) a role game must be well-prepared;
2) all the steps of the game (preparation, consideration and analysis) must be conducted in the English language;
3) to participate in the game students must have a command of certain grammar structures, communication patterns and vocabulary;
4) the topic of the role game must be interesting for students. Each step of a role play is fraught with a number of problematic points which must be taken into consideration.

Though case studies include the same steps (preparation, consideration and analysis), they analyze a real situation that a certain company faced. As opposed to role plays, case studies presuppose the solution of a global task within a scope of a certain business. The focus is shifted from language skill training to the analysis of the situation itself taking into account historical and temporal factors. Students are given more freedom, case studies center around working out the alternatives for solving the problem and the choice of the most appropriate one. The most stimulating factor is the realness of the situation that gives students the possibility to put themselves in the place of the company staff and compare their decision with the one taken by the management of the company. The cases can be divided into simple (mini-cases) and complex cases.

Role games and case studies help to use acquired professional skills in the conditions of a possible professional situation. It is an active method of teaching, which creates a problem and organizes problem-solving, which involves all the students who learn to formulate and express their reasons and work out common decision.

Keywords:

Educational games, case studies, role games.