Results and discussion

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47 available for a very limited number of employees, and as HR6 said, “I’m not convinced that we can continue this next year” (p. 1).

Apart from three organisations where options for learning Russian and Spanish are also available, only English can be learnt on the premises of the other 15 companies including the German and Austrian multinationals, which underpins the conquest of the English language discussed in Chapter 2. Language courses are generally available for both managers and employees and are held before or after core time for employees, whereas managers tend to choose the time of their lessons whenever it is most convenient for them.

Practically this can be any time on a weekday between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The data have confirmed the results of previous studies (Kálmán, 2015b, 2015c) in as much as there has been a definite shift from general courses of English towards English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses in this context. General basic and intermediate level English courses are predominantly held in the four organisations based in the country, whereas in the capital city advanced English, business English, presentation language, negotiation language and profession specific Englishes are taught primarily. This has been confirmed by several of the respondents. HR16 said, “We only organise financial and insurance English courses” (p. 1), whereas HR5 had this to say, “we don’t have general English, it is only for arts students. What we do is business English at least, but rather something specific related to the field of the employee” (p. 1). HR4, who was previously qualified as a language teacher expressed her criticism explicitly:

The truth is that if I were older, I would start lobbying at universities to convince them to teach language majors not only what they study today. If you decide to be a language teacher, it should be taken into consideration where you’d like to do that. If you’d like to teach adults or teach in a corporate environment, at the very least you should study business English, but rather something even more specific.

In my experience, even general business poses problems to a lot of teachers, let alone work processes and specialisations. (p. 3)

All of the investigated companies agreed that the costs of on-site language education were dwarfed by the costs of engineering, technical, IT, managerial, team-building, and communications courses, and were financed from their budget. A commonly held opinion voiced by five of the participants was that, “taking part in a scheme supported and run by the government entails so much bureaucracy and administration that we rather do without it” (HR2, p. 2). In six of the companies, language courses for the workers are free, in the

48 other 12, employees are obliged to contribute to the costs of the courses. This contribution ranges from 15 to 60% and the majority of the organisations refund this amount after the employees have passed the exam specified in their educational contract. Failure to fulfil this obligation entails sanctions of different severity. Consequences vary from being transferred or demoted (the toughest) to revoking the right to participate in future courses (the most lenient).

With the exception of one multinational, all of the participants unanimously stated that their employees were required to take some kind of language exams at the end of their courses or at the end of the term specified in their educational contract. Six of the employers prefer bilingual exams on the grounds that employees should be able to translate as well, but they do not mind what kind of exam the employees pass as long as it is accredited. Two of the organisations have devised their own in-house exams in cooperation with their partner language schools, and test their employees with real-life tasks, for example giving a presentation or writing a prompt email, which they claim provides a much more credible assessment on the skills the learners are expected to master.

As far as a historical perspective is concerned, 12 of the companies have described a similar development pattern introduced in Chapter 4 of my dissertation arriving at the attractor in the middle of the 2000s. They have their well-established processes of organising the courses, drawing up educational contracts with the learners, and commissioning well-tried language schools:

In my opinion, it seems very good as it as. The learners are motivated, it’s not that when I’m in the mood I come, when I’m not I don’t. The results are very good, everybody passes the exam at the end of the course. This is why I said it seems to be working well. I don’t think we should change. Maybe, we could extend the range of languages with Russian, but that is the only change I can think of (HR15, p. 2).

The other six have either been adversely affected by recent politics, have been going through volatile transitions (market forces, change in ownership), or have not been operating long enough to have a history of language education.

As far as the future is concerned, with the exception of two participants, all the HR managers were enthusiastic and optimistic about the future of on-site language courses. Even those organisations that are earmarking less for this purpose at the moment would like to put more resources and emphasis on this activity. One of them said, “I think we will have to

49 make it available for more of our employees. It might happen any time soon that a foreigner is brought on our Board of Directors and there will be a bigger need” (HR10, p. 2). One of the two participants who predicted language education might be terminated in the future in their organisations comes from an American multinational that on the one hand, abounds in employees with an excellent command of English, on the other hand, the industry he represents has been severely affected by a political reshuffle on the market in the past two years. He contended, “it is possible that it’ll be reduced, I’m not convinced that we need it”

(HR6, p. 1). The other, HR1, sees English courses at her company as a temporary necessity that helps employees prepare for the European and global integration of their organisation scheduled for 2016, and she is not sure that the language education programme will continue after that.

There is one change however – expressed by the majority of the participants –which is aptly summarised by HR18:

I have been at the company since 2008. Back then, the main purpose of the courses was to take learners from level A to level B, as many employees as possible.

During the credit crunch there was a smaller slump and now, in the past two years, language education has come back again. But now we are focusing on those employees who really need it for their daily work in order to improve their particular skills in English. It should be something specific, related to their work.

We have thought it over, it should absolutely be English for Specific Purposes. (p.

1)

The next section of the interview dealt with the question of selection. I would have liked to explore how organisations select language schools, language teachers, what kind of expectations their vendors have to meet, and whether they ask their employees for any kind of feedback on the quality of their vendors’ work. I was also curious to find out whether they meet the teachers or the representatives of their vendors to evaluate their employees’

progress. Finally, I found it interesting to explore what they thought of native teachers, and what possible problems their companies had had with language educators.

The interviews revealed that slightly more than half of the organisations (11) selected their language teaching vendors by announcing a tender based on a set of carefully selected criteria. Others chose on the basis of recommendations, references, reputation, personal experience of the HR manager, or a top manager; and in the case of organisations working in the country, on the basis of availability. Five of the HR managers have “inherited” their

50 companies’ language educators and are satisfied with them, “we inherited them, so they weren’t chosen by us, but as long as the company and the employees are satisfied, they’ll stay” (HR11, p. 2). Another interesting corporate social responsibility (CSR) aspect emerged at a one of the organisations based in the country:

It was my suggestion to commission local businesses and it is working very well even today. For a start it comes in handy for the local businesses that we support them. There are three language schools locally, so we don’t have such a wide variety of companies to choose from as in Budapest, but there are three schools and we always invite them in a tender, and usually two of them win. (HR15, p. 2) When the participants were asked about what expectations they had of the vendors they contracted, I found out that many of these were commonsensical and addressed the legal framework of the enterprise, such as, “having the necessary licences and qualifications to teach adults, working as a limited company or partnership as opposed to a sole proprietor to prevent problems resulting from deputising if a teacher should fall ill” (HR9, p. 1), or

“managing administrative tasks just as well, as it can be a huge pitfall” (HR17, p. 2). This is also confirmed by HR13:

I’m absolutely put out by this guy. It’s not easy with him. He comes in and starts to make out the invoice in front of me, and he makes a mistake. And he starts it all over again. Or, we have a signed agreement at the beginning of the year. Three months later he wants to modify it. Anyway, he is not a simple guy. (p. 2)

Other commonly voiced expectations were being punctual, professional, well-prepared, cooperative, enthusiastic, motivating, hands-on, goal-orientated, and achieving results (in the form of in-house or official language exams). In order to find out whether these criteria are met, only three of the companies resort to formal evaluation procedures.

There was unanimous agreement in the other 15 companies that if there was a problem, it would get back to the HR manager through verbal, informal channels and the problems would be addressed immediately. The HR managers typically get a written evaluation of the employees’ progress at the end of the course or annually, and apart from this, they occasionally meet the teachers or the head teacher of the language school to get some informal feedback, as well.

51 Problems that organisations sometimes have had to tackle are, “the teacher and the group are not on the same wavelength, so we have to ask for another teacher” (HR3, p. 2),

“sometimes a language school is not able to provide as many teachers as we need” (HR18, p. 3), “the teacher tries to convince the learners to take a monolingual exam when only bilingual language exams are accepted by the company” (HR9, p. 1), “teachers can only teach general English” (HR1, p. 2), and finally, “the teacher was an excellent teacher in a primary school, but unfortunately she treated our employees accordingly. She wasn’t able to take it on board that this was adult education” (HR15, p. 3).

On the whole, the organisations seemed content with the work of the language schools and teachers. The expectations that were formulated at the beginning of their cooperation were generally met. The requirements that stood out in the interviews, however, as key in contributing to the satisfaction of the commissioners were flexibility, tailor-made teaching, and the ability to teach ESP. All of the participants emphasised the importance of these related qualities/requirements. HR2 elaborated on flexibility in this way:

By flexibility I also mean that if the employees come up with emerging needs during the course or on behalf of the employer I change the goal, the focus, or the content of the course, the teacher should be flexible in adjusting to the new situation. (pp. 1-2)

Under the term of flexibility other respondents cited flexibility in time, place, syllabus, course book, pace, learning style, and availability. There was an equally outstandingly high number of references to the need for tailor-made teaching, which very often took shape in teaching ESP for the learners. HR10 expressed this in these words:

It is absolutely important that the teachers should be very pragmatic. We don’t expect our managers to have a very thorough knowledge of the English grammar or to be able to read Shakespeare in original. The teachers have to prepare our managers to communicate in ANY situation. Our managers have to conduct very tough negotiations. They are very efficient in this in Hungarian, and they should be just as efficient in English, too. (p. 2)

HR11 was of a similar opinion, “in the limited time they can devote to learning, I’d really like them to practise only that particular situation that they encounter day by day” (p. 3). On the same topic HR16 said the following, “the quality of the education is defined by how flexibly the teacher can accommodate to the specific needs” (p. 3), whereas HR13

52 emphasised the following: ”if anybody needs technical English, I think it would be great if the teacher had that kind of knowledge so that they could discuss such issues” (p. 1). HR2 confirmed that, “there’s a definite shift towards ESP” (p. 1). HR12 described a very successful cooperation with a language school as follows:

Their greatest competitive edge is that they have been here for 20 years, and by now, they have fully developed their tailor-made courses specially designed for us. They have developed how to teach the technical language, web-based solutions, which focus on what you have to say in a meeting, how you have to say it, and how you can solve problems in English, etc. (p. 3)

There was a definite preference for non-native teachers among the participants. Three of them mentioned it marginally that in some cases, above a certain linguistic and hierarchical level in the organisation they see the employment of a native teacher justified, but HR managers’ negative experience with native teachers of English outweighs that with non-natives by far. HR17 expressed the opinion of several of the HR managers in this way:

Native teachers are usually not qualified teachers. They have been in Hungary for some time, they are good-for-nothing. We hire them sometimes when our employees are on a higher level, but we don’t have good experience with them. In my opinion, Hungarian English teachers are much better qualified and they can teach the grammar much better, as well (p. 2).

This was also confirmed by HR8, and HR13, although HR3 added that, “the situation with native teachers has been improving recently. Now they are starting to get better and better- prepared, too” (p. 3).

Finally, oddly enough, only four of the participants mentioned the favourable fee of a lesson as a criterion of selection, and HR18 said the following on prices:

The price is a very interesting question. In my opinion, the lower we go in prices, the worse the quality of the service is. If you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys.

This is probably true for any kind of service, but especially true for language education. I’m speaking from experience, so I would say it’s not worth choosing the cheapest. (p. 3)

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