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 working already in the financial industry. The level of English is intermediate or upper-intermediate.
The book contains 158 pages and provides more than 50 hours of classroom material as well as a sound quantity of listening material.
The course consists of 24 units which are divided into odd-numbered units and even-numbered units.
The odd-numbered units cover specific areas of finance like retail and investment banking, trade finance, asset management, and accounting.
In the even-numbered units, you practice business communication skills such as telephoning, socializing, participating in meetings, writing letters, emails, and reports, negotiating, and making presentations with the financial context always being tackled.
Each unit has got a particular Language focus section and Practice activities of the real world using particular file cards displayed after the end of the units.
The listening material includes British, American, European, and Indian speakers making the book really diversified in terms of getting used to a wide range of native or nonnative speakers all over the world particularly when interacting in the Real Business world.
At the beginning you will find a clearly structured and detailed overview of the contents of the book illustrating each unit with its key aspects such as title, vocabulary, reading, listening, language focus, speaking and writing issues.
This way you get a good glimpse of what is going to be taught in each unit.
File cards for the role plays are bundled after the units are finished followed by Tape scripts of all the listening material.
A word list is set up at the very end of the book summarizing all necessary vocabulary in alphabetical order and referring to the respective unit numbers.
From my perspective, the differentiation of odd and even-numbered units however raises an eye brow, because I am getting a bit confused finding the red thread through the book.
In my opinion, it would have been more beneficial to put together all kinds of topics around the area of finance in the first part and list the skills section afterward. That way you don’t get the feeling of always hopping from one unit into another.
The units are basically structured like this: All units start off with a brief hint regarding the overall objective of the unit and continue with a so-called lead-in also known as a warm-up session.
There is at least one vocabulary part as well as one listening part and one reading part included. Each unit contains a language focus section.
Basically, I would favor this kind of setup for every unit.
Concerning the odd-numbered units, I would suggest having unit 7 “Accounting” and unit 21 “Asset Management” stick more closely together in this book due to their similar contents which makes also a sense in terms of my own experience working in this sector at the moment.
With regard to the even-numbered units, I think that unit 8, which is about “Socializing”, would have been better integrated earlier in this book especially as a warm-up section.
Due to my own expertise in terms of teaching employees at the company where I work right now, I can confirm that this field of subject definitely needs to be fostered quite a bit. As far as I have figured out during the last 10 years there is a huge lack of skills tackled with social English and even paired with small talk requirements nowadays.
Overall, I would really recommend this book to the enthusiastic reader in particular when he or she is inclined to improve his or her sound knowledge about financial business English. I am convinced that you will get out the most of it and benefit from a broad variety of distinguished topics which are contained.
If you try to digest each unit according to your specific needs and deficits you will surely love the book since it will turn out as a hands-on manual for your daily life.
To sum it up, it is absolutely worthwhile to buy the book for the sake of your own progress in this matter.
