1. LINGUA INGLESE SCIENZE DELL’ORGANIZZAZIONE a.a. 2015/2016 Prof. Teresa Prudente teresa.prudente@unimib.it

2. MATERIALS TEXTBOOK Handford, Lisboa, Koester, Pitt, Business Advantage, Student’s Book, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 978-0-521-13217-6 REVISING/IMPROVING THE LANGUAGE E-learning site: a course structured in 10 lessons, each revising grammar, lexicon, speaking and reading Go to: http://elearning.unimib.it/course/view.php?id=9854http://elearning.unimib.it/course/view.php?id=9854 (you can access the course with your unimib credentials and don’t need an access key)

3. METHODS THEORY Understanding key business principles and ideas in relation to English speaking environments PRACTICE Analysing case studies (texts and interviews) of real companies. This will allow us to apply the theories to the business world. SKILLS Discourse analysis (rethorical strategies, register, collocations, texture, etc…) will lead to awareness in your employment of business English (reading, writing, speaking) Critical thinking Intercultual analysis

4. Online tools for vocabulary (dictionaries & thesauruses) General English: http://www.oed.com/ http://www.wordreference.com/ http://www.merriam-webster.com/ Business English: http://www.businessdictionary.com/

5. COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT (Textbook: Unit 1) In economic terms, a market is not a place, but a process which is a result of human action. The theory of perfect competition is often seen as ideal; there is division of labour and private ownership of land and capital, where buyers and sellers are too numerous to have individual control over price and there are no barriers to market entry and exit. It assumes that government acts to preserve the system and does not intervene.

6. From the Business Dictionary Labour: the aggregate of all human physical and mental effort used in creation of goods and services. Labour is a primary factor of production. The size of a nation's labor force is determined by the size of its adult population, and the extent to which the adults are either working or are prepared to offer their labour for wages. Market entry: Activities associated with bringing a product or service to a targeted market. During the planning stage, a company will consider the barriers to entry, the costs of marketing, sales and delivery, and the expected outcome of entering the market.

7. A monopoly is where one producer (or a group of producers acting together) controls the supply of a good or service and the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted. A natural monopoly exists when the cost of producing a product or service is lower for one producer than it would be if there were many producers. (Public utilities)

8. Oligopoly: suppliers are few in number. They do not necessarily act together, but can effectively control the supply and thus the price of the product. They often offer similar products differentiated by advertisement and can anticipate the effect of one another’s marketing strategies.

9. Globalisation The worldwide movement towards economic, financial, trade and communications integration including the transfer of capital, goods and services across borders. It does not include the free movement of labour across borders.

10. Sport as a metaphor and analogy for business (textbook: p. 10)

11. collocations In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. High-frequency collocation with adverbs in the previous sentences: - largely monopolised /little monopolised - acted illegally/legally - heavily regulated/ poorly regulated - increasingly globalized /decreasingly globalized - invested heavily /invested poorly

12. Case study 1/ textbook p. 13-14

19. Case Study 1 – expanded online On pp. 13-14 of your textbook you have the history of Saint-Gobain as published on the company’s website. Your textbook was published in 2011, so we need to check how the company is presenting itself now. To do that, go on the company’s corporate website (https://www.saint-gobain.com/en), and analyse the following elements:https://www.saint-gobain.com/en -technical: how is the website structured? -Colours and images -Think of the slogan/catchphrase they use – what’s its purpose? -Role of social media -In which languages is this website available?

20. Case study 1: the history of Saint-Gobain Check the pages on Saint-Gobain’s website documenting the history of the company. Is the text the same as the one reported in your book? https://www.saint-gobain.com/en/group/our-history Consider the role of webcontent (images and multimedia) in the present version of Saint Gobain’s history on the company’s website.

21. Case Study 1 Intercultural analysis: Check the company’s website for the Italian market: https://www.saint-gobain.it/ What differences do you notice with respect to the corporate website in English? Analyse the differences in terms of: -images/colours -Images in the gallery: they show examples of the company’s Italian clients – which ones and why do you think they selected those particular examples rather than others? -Ways of addressing the viewer.