“English for the Financial Sector” basically comes with a Student’s Book, a Teacher’s Book and a CD. The student’s book is supposed to be ideal for business students and people already working in the financial industry. The level of English is intermediate or upper intermediate.
The book contains 158 pages and provides over 50 hours of teaching material, as well as a fair amount of listening material.
The course consists of 24 units that are divided into odd units and even units.
The odd-numbered units cover specific areas of finance such as retail and investment banking, trade finance, asset management, and accounting.
In the even units, you will practice business communication skills such as making telephone calls, socializing, participating in meetings, writing letters, emails and reports, negotiating and presenting with the financial context always covered.
Each unit has a particular language focus section and real world practice activities using particular file cards that are displayed after the end of the units.
The listening material includes British, American, European and Indian speakers, which makes the book really diversified in terms of getting used to a wide range of native or non-native speakers from around the world, especially when interacting in the real world. of bussiness.
At the beginning, you will find a clearly structured and detailed overview of the book’s content illustrating each unit with its key aspects, such as title, vocabulary, reading, listening comprehension, language focus, and speaking issues. and writing.
This way you will get a good idea of what is going to be taught in each unit.
File cards for the role plays are bundled together after the units are finished, followed by tape scripts of all the listening material.
A word list is created at the end of the book that summarizes all the necessary vocabulary in alphabetical order and refers to the respective unit numbers.
However, from my perspective, the differentiation of units with odd and even numbers raises an eyebrow, because I’m getting a bit confused finding the red thread through the book.
In my opinion, it would have been more beneficial to gather all kinds of topics around the finance area in the first part and list the skills section later. That way you don’t have the feeling of always jumping from one unit to another.
The units are basically structured as follows: all units start with a brief suggestion about the general objective of the unit and continue with a so-called introduction, also known as a warm-up session.
There is at least a vocabulary part as well as a listening part and a reading part included. Each unit contains a language focus section.
Basically I would prefer this type of setup for each drive.
Regarding the odd units, I would suggest that unit 7 “Accounting” and unit 21 “Asset Management” be kept closer together in this book due to their similar contents, which also makes sense in terms of my own experience working on this book. industry at the moment.
Regarding the even units, I think unit 8, which deals with “Socializing”, would have been better integrated earlier in this book, especially as a warm-up section.
Due to my own experience in terms of teaching the employees of the company I work for at the moment, I can confirm that this subject field definitely needs to be encouraged a lot. From what I have found out, for the last 10 years there is a huge lack of skills that are addressed with social English and even combined with the casual conversations requirements today.
Overall, I would really recommend this book to the keen reader, particularly when you are willing to improve your solid knowledge of financial business English. I’m sure you’ll get the most out of it and benefit from the wide variety of featured themes it contains.
If you try to digest each unit according to your specific needs and shortcomings, you will surely love the book as it will become a practical manual for your daily life.
In short, the book is absolutely worth buying for the sake of your own progress in this matter.