Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

The presentations and reports participants were expected to give in the workplacehad a clearly defined purpose (to inform and often to persuade). In addition,effective delivery in both cases depends on accurate analysis of the audience’sneeds. All these aspects helped to build links between the two strands of the training.Looking at skillsSuccess in giving an effective briefing or writing a report depends on:■■■■■■■■Being organised – organising information and ideas through language to meetthe needs of the audience/reader.Being clear – highlighting information, clarifying argument, avoiding ambiguity.Being precise and exact – distinguishing fact from opinion, avoiding unduegeneralisation and perhaps an element of hedging.Being economical – using language and presenting information with theaudience’s needs in mind: neither too much or too little.Identification of these characteristics produced a happy (if rather corny) acronymof COPE – clarity, organisation, precision and economy – and the suggestion thatthe course would help trainees COPE with real-life tasks. The underlying principleof COPE also helped unify the two strands of training.Choice of face-to-face and blended learningQuite logically, the real-life differences between oral briefings and written reportssuggested a face-to-face briefings course and an online writing course. I wouldargue that presentation skills can only be learned through doing, through traineesinteracting with peers, providing evaluations of each others’ performance andpractising and refining these skills through face-to-face interaction. Traineedevelopment can only come from within but the presence of the trainer as coachcan provide immediate input and act as catalyst. Progress can be rapid and canhave a significant impact within a short period.In real life, report writing is much more of a reflective, solitary activity in whichthe report-writer, sometimes with others but often alone, collects, marshals andorganises data, makes choices in grammar and lexis to present it and manipulatesa range of rhetorical functions to meet the needs of an unseen, if often clearlydefined, reader. As such, it clearly lends itself to a situation unfolding over time wheretrainer and trainee do not work face-to-face. In practical terms, it also clearly metparticipants’ needs as the entire course could be completed during overseas service.Course designEffective course design depended on a harmonious combination of the two strandsso that one course component complemented rather than supplemented the otherin the sense of a ‘good Scotch whisky’ (Isackson, 2002). The IMFRC structure andCOPE principles unified the course (at the risk of overloading participants withacronyms) but equally so did the fact that both courses took as their starting pointthe imperative to meet the needs of the audience (the writer/speaker as writer,Blended learning for English for occupational purposes | 149