Unit 11c: Book

1. Introduction

Apart from your tech savviness, data literacy and creativity, what employers also expect is a good level of “soft” skills, i.e., flexibility, adaptability and strong communication skills. This requires a high level of social intelligence, which includes the ability to communicate appropriately vis-à-vis social status. In other words, when expressing concerns, you need to use appropriate language based on your social awareness and be able to distinguish between aggressive, assertive and passive ways of expressing them.

Sometimes communicating your ideas, needs and concerns can be a problem, especially when communicating with someone higher up the “chain of command”. Such communication usually requires a certain level of assertiveness on your part. This is a form of communication in which you state your needs clearly, showing respect for yourself, while simultaneously showing respect for the other person. It has nothing to do with aggressive communication, in which you state your needs in a hostile or demanding manner, or with passive communication, in which you stay silent and do not state your needs at all, or you stay muted, that is, express your needs very weakly. This passivity can be fatal, as in the case of two plane crashes this unit is going deal with.

Adapted from:

Bingham, C., Wright, L. (2013). Technical English Level 4 Teacher´s Book. Pearson Longman, p. 109.

Contents

• Phrases for communicating concerns effectively
• Communication between employees and their superiors
• Preparing/Completing an incident report

2. Forum: Communication

In what circumstances might a junior employee tell a supervisor or manager that he or she is wrong? Would you do that? Under what circumstances? Express your opinion in this forum.

3. Listening: Emergency Situations

In this listening task, you are going to hear or read about three situations in which an employee is communicating his/her concerns to a senior officer or manager.

The contexts are as follows:

1) A vibrating turbine in a turbine hall of a hydroelectric power plant;

2) A passenger plane taking off at too low a speed;

3) The same scenario as in (2), but with another ending.

Your task in the listening exercise is to match the recording on the right to the description on the left. Then, provide a technical explanation behind the airspeed indicator failure here. To make this task easier, you may find it useful to study the diagram on p. 89 in your coursebook.

The airspeed indicator seemed to be one of the possible causes of the plane crash. The other cause probably was poor communication in the plane´s cockpit. So now, look at these guidelines for effective communication and put them in the correct order.

4. Communicating Concerns in a Workplace

Assertive communication is not needed just in emergency situations, but also when communicating concerns at work. This sorting exercise will provide you with some useful phrases used for communicating effectively in a workplace. Your task will be to complete the overview, so that all the phrases are categorized according to the guidelines specified in the previous task. Then complete this reading task to learn about the right way to bring a problem to a boss, and listen to an expert specifying two conditions that must be fulfilled for successfully doing so. As you watch the video, complete this task. Finally, play your part successfully in this role-play.

5. Another Emergency Case

After covering effective ways of communicating in a workplace and practising them, you can now go back to a technical topic and see another emergency case. Another aircraft incident in which poor communication and a technical problem played major roles was the one in which a plane disappeared in a high-altitude thunderstorm.  Imagine you are a member of an investigative team trying to find out the possible causes of the incident. First, you are interviewing a representative of the airline about the crash. Listen to what he says and complete the notes here. Then, complete this report on the crash of the airliner.

6. Word List

The key terms related to the topic of Unit 11c can be found:

• in the Excel format here.
• in the interactive flash card format here. This format is particularly good for drilling the new vocabulary.
• in a zip file here. This file is downloadable, so that after unpacking it, you can drill the new vocabulary on your desktop, laptop or any other portable device where you have a browser installed. Important: after unzipping the zip file, make sure to keep all the related files in the same directory at all times. Do not change any file names and do not transfer or delete anything.

Recommendation: Remember that the best way to learn new vocabulary is to see each new word in a context; that is, step by step as you complete all the tasks in the unit.

7. A printer-friendly version of Unit 11c

A printer-friendly version of Unit 11c exercises and the key to these exercises can be found here.