摘要
The paper presents new developments in teaching English for business communication to pre-experienced students It presents a short history of changes that have occurred in the teaching methodologies in Europe in the last 40 years It shreds some light on the priorities of the last decades and on the ever growing importance of students＇ needs. It stresses the changes resulting from globalization, new business opportunities and new trends in employment. The changing business environment makes it necessary to improve communicative competence. Recently, the linguistic component of ESP （English for Specific Purposes） courses for pre-experienced students has been increasingly combined with the sociolinguistic and pragmatic components which contribute greatly to good communicative competence. The new approach is much more challenging for business English teachers and requires much higher qualifications, e.g., content knowledge and business skills. In order to increase the effectiveness of ESP courses, we need teaching materials based on corpus studies that could prioritize the highest-frequency business lexis and streamline students＇ efforts. In the fiercely competitive world of today, students need to concentrate on things that are likely to help them become good business communicators
