English for the Financial Sector

“English for the Financial Sector” basically comes with a Student’s Book, a Teacher’s Book and a CD. The student book is supposed to be ideal for business students and people already working 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 teaching material, as well as a good amount of listening material.

The course consists of 24 units that are divided into odd units and even units.

Odd units cover specific areas of finance such as retail and investment banking, trade finance, asset management, and accounting.

In the peer units, you will practice business communication skills such as calling on the phone, socializing, participating in meetings, writing letters, emails and reports, negotiating and making presentations with the financial context always addressed.

Each unit has a particular language focus section and real-world practice activities using particular file cards displayed after the end of the units.

The listening material includes British, American, European and Indian speakers, which makes the book really diversified in terms of getting used to a wide range of native and non-native speakers from around the world, especially when interacting in the real world of business.

At the beginning, you will find a clearly structured and detailed overview of the book’s content that illustrates each unit with its key aspects, such as the title, vocabulary, reading, listening, language focus, speaking and writing.

This way you will get a good idea of ​​what is going to be taught in each unit.

File cards for the role plays are put together after the units are finished, followed by tape scripts of all the listening material.

A word list is created at the end of the book that summarizes all the necessary vocabulary in alphabetical order and references the respective unit numbers.

However, from my perspective, differentiating units with odd and even numbers raises an eyebrow, because I’m getting a bit confused finding the red thread through the book.

In my opinion, it would have been more beneficial to gather all kinds of topics around the finance area in the first part and list the skills section afterwards. That way you don’t have the feeling of always jumping from one unit to another.

The units are basically structured as follows: all units start with a brief suggestion about the general objective of the unit and continue with a so-called introduction, also known as a warm-up session.

There is at least one vocabulary part, as well as a listening part and a reading part included. Each unit contains a linguistic focus section.

Basically I would prefer this kind of setup for every drive.

Regarding the odd units, I would suggest that unit 7 “Accounting” and unit 21 “Asset Management” be kept closer together in this book due to their similar contents, which also makes sense in terms of own experience working on this. industry at the moment.

Regarding the even units, I think 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 experience in terms of teaching the employees of the company I work for at the moment, I can confirm that this field of the subject definitely needs to be encouraged quite a bit. From what I have discovered, for the last 10 years there is a great lack of skills that are addressed with social English and even combined with the requirements of informal conversations today.

Overall, I would really recommend this book to the enthusiastic reader, particularly when you are keen to improve your solid knowledge of Financial Business English. I am convinced that you will get the most out of it and benefit from the wide variety of featured themes it contains.

If you try to digest each unit according to your specific needs and deficiencies, you will surely love the book as it will become a practical manual for your daily life.

In short, the book is absolutely worth buying for the sake of your own progress in this matter.