At last, a business English textbook that’s engaging and fun, and that does more than simply teach vocabulary!

Taking Care of Business brings business English to life by having students create and manage their own “virtual” companies. These become a platform for exercises and activities that systematically teach business concepts, business skills, and business language.

Taking Care of Business is available from Amazon USA, Amazon Japan, and other Amazon stores.

The advantages of Taking Care of Business include…

Student Engagement

Learning is highly personalized and taps into student creativity. Students create their own companies and jobs, which reflect and express their individual interests, ideas, and career goals. As managers of their companies, they develop new products or services; create logos, taglines, business cards, and mission statements; network at a trade show; set prices and sell products and services to customers; create a TV commercial; and hire new employees. All this makes for a lively, student-centered classroom and a learning experience that is highly interactive, practical, and enjoyable for both student and teacher.

To see what students say about Taking Care of Business, check out the Student Comments here.

Integrated Content

Most business English textbooks are basically language textbooks dressed in business clothing: standard ESL activities that use unrelated or loosely connected business topics as content. Taking Care of Business is a sound language textbook with a good balance of speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities. But it is also built around a compelling storyline—students creating and running their own companies—that provides a strong conceptual framework for the presentation and sequencing of content. This produces a natural recycling and reinforcement of vocabulary, language forms, and business concepts.

Business Knowledge, Skills, and Language

Working effectively in business requires understanding and applying basic business knowledge; business skills such as teamwork, networking, selling, bargaining, and presentations; and business language. With Taking Care of Business, students systematically learn and practice all of these.

Using Taking Care of Business

No prior knowledge of business is needed to use this textbook. For students, the readings and exercises in the text clearly explain all the business concepts you need to know. For instructors, a Teacher’s Manual is available free-of-charge from BlueSky Publishing. The manual includes detailed instructions and suggestions for using Taking Care of Business in various classroom situations, as well as explanations of all business-related concepts and practices introduced in the book.

Appendix A contains answers to all the matching and fill-in-the-blank exercises in the book. Appendix B contains complete scripts for all the listening exercises, which are indicated by this symbol:

To listen to the audio recordings of the listening exercises, just visit the TCB Listening Exercises page.