Business Writing skills: Transforming Activities

Business Writing Skills : Transforming Activities.

It’s undoubtedly that transforming activity is of much help to learners of business English.
• It’s one way to raise the learner’s awareness to the difference of style, layout and register that each genre of business writing may involve.
• It’s a learner-centred task where the learner decides for himself relying on his autonomy. He becomes active in the learning process. As the Chinese proverb crudely puts it ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day .Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a life time’.
• The task itself involves the improvement of other skills such as discussion, questioning and explaining.
• Learners have different learning styles and transforming as an activity may serve to cater for those learners who favour to implement and understand phrases in context.

Concerning the advantage of activities such the one provided (Doe and John Buck), I think they are useful. Apart from the benefits they offer if approached as transforming tasks, they can be used as input text. And at the productive stage, if learners asked to write a reply they have, then, a reason to write with a clear purpose.

How to sequence the activities in class, I think it’s up to the teachers’ discretion.

We can also give learners two versions of formal and informal genre in broken sentences and then learners try to sort them out.
Also, as a dictation activity game (runner and secretary).Teacher hang broken sentences of letter outside the classroom. Student one acts as a runner goes out and dictates the sentences to the secretary ( students rotate roles).stage two student try to put the letter in the right order (raise sts awareness to the lay outs).