Three Australian innovations in language education for business purposes

Amongst the strategic ‘pillars’ of Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology is a desire to embrace internationalisation. Three years ago a restructure of SUT’s Faculty structure was undertaken to encourage this focus. The restructure placed language teaching within the School of Business, in an attempt to enhance the international focus of the business courses and to provide a fresh and unique focus for language teaching. The result is a highly distinctive blend of Asian and European focussed language programs with practical business teaching. This paper outlines innovative teaching developments that have taken place in response to this challenge. It exposes a set of ‘language and culture’ curriculum innovations, overseas work experience opportunities that may be incorporated within student courses, and web-based reading and listening interactive lessons for Japanese language acquisition.