Some Issues in the Teaching of Vocabulary: to Students of Business English

One of the greatest challenges for non-native speakers of English is collocations, those phrases that we use all the time that just don't translate well into other languages. For example the in English we say to catch a cold but in other languages they say to eat a cold. As soon as a non-native speaker directly translates their phrase correctly, they give away their identity. In business situations this can put the speaker at a disadvantage as most people associate low language ability with low intelligence. A single collocation mistake can have a dramatic impact on the way an employee is perceived in the office. In my work with multiple non-native speakers with high level executive positions at international firms, I often found that a few collocation mistakes led to a great deal of embarrassment in the workplace as her supervisor then demanded to review and edit every single email before she was allowed to send it to another department. This highly intelligent executive left her position shortly after this experience. By short cutting the collocation learning curve we can help our business students have better work experiences.