Introduction
As a member of a Teaching Staff Specialized in the Teaching of German at the Department of International Business Languages at the Faculty of International Management and Business (FIMB) of the Budapest Business School (BBS), I have been involved since 1998 in the teaching of various courses in 'German for Business' to full-time as well as part-time students, within the framework of BA as well as MA curricula.
During my entire career as a professional committed to language teaching, I have been adamant in developing my students' skills with the aim of rendering them capable of taking control of a learning process crucial for the attainment of an even higher level of professionalism in the use of specialized language, rather than confining my training objectives to helping my students in a classroom situation where they can only acquire key competences in the use of the German language, exploitable in various instances of business communication. My policy is, therefore, to improve my students' language acquisition culture – relying on the principles of a scholarly approach – by widening the horizon from language acquisition to a more complex culture stemming from the requirements of self-training. In order to get the most out of self-training as a learning process, I regularly use material accessible from the Online Centre of Languages, a training facility administered by the Department of International Business Languages.
Successful language acquisition being an objective that both my students and myself aim for, we prefer to work in an innovative learning environment the foundations of which have been built on the principles of blended learning, integrated counselling on language learning, blended coaching, ”mirrored classroom”, the project-oriented teaching of a specialized language, and the process of language learning effectuated in simulation games designed to contextualize the workplace environment. I have created the so-called TTÖPP© system, which, if used systematically and in full awareness of its objectives, can help students of economics learning 'German for Business' further enhance the efficiency of their language learning agenda.
The acquisition of a series of competences required for the teaching of a foreign language, used in the world of business today, has been made possible – apart from my undergraduate years at the university – by a body of work comprising a range of assignments and projects such as language teaching, language teacher training, my ongoing PhD project, my research and training activity undertaken while in Germany as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) trainee, my work experience in a corporate environment in Germany, my experience as a professional teaching courses in specialized languages in various companies where the management was either Hungarian or non-Hungarian, my role as an examiner in the Foreign Language Examination Centre of the Budapest Business School, along with a number of language teaching and innovative projects in FIMB, all of which I have been involved in for over 20 years.