Developing creative use of business english/german through team work

Abstract

The integration into the European and world community has created a vital necessity for a creative level of foreign language use. Unfortunately, a lot of students display a lack of reproductive thinking and speaking in a foreign language. The resources of FL teaching are much more concerned with promoting creativity rather than helping learners become creative in FL use. Therefore the aim of this paper is to acquaint with the results of the classroom research proposing some practical ways for teaching learners creative language use pertaining to the formality level of Business English (BE) and Business German (BG) communication. Students' creative behaviour has been supported through team work. The creative language use has been assessed taking into consideration students' overall lexical complexity (phrases, structures, heightened emotions) of simulation as well as the following categories of discourse: self selection of the problem, framing and sequencing the activity to solve it most originally and appropriately.