Evaluation of a Business English Class through the Analysis of University Students’ Perceptions

The purpose of this study was to explore university students’ perceptions and an evaluation of a Business English class offered to them. Drawing on the result of the needs analysis, the class was designed to help them acquire communicative competence and language skills. A total of 62 students at a local university in Busan participated in the study. The data were collected through a questionnaire consisting of 21 closed and 7 open-ended questions, and student interviews. Results of the analysis showed that the students believed they needed to improve their speaking most because they believed it was important for their future job performance. In addition, the students were satisfied with activities and tasks they carried out during class including learning sentence patterns and structures related to business, practicing speaking through situational conversations, writing an English resume and a cover letter, and doing English presentations as group work. Among them, especially, learning sentence patterns and structures and working on their English resume and cover letter elicited the most positive reactions from them due to their usefulness. However, the students expressed their dissatisfaction with the large class size and working as a group for the presentation. More pedagogical implications were suggested.