Rationale

Rationale
Today, the demand for business English is greater than ever. And with the increasingly globalised world of international business, it looks set to keep on growing. As a result, the teaching and learning of Business English is playing an increasingly important role in business studies and everyday corporate life. Although the need for Business English is the same for students at a business school as it is for employees in a company, their needs and learning circumstances are very different.
For students at a business school, the main challenge is often understanding business itself, not only the English language. Fortunately, the tertiary education environment usually provides only enough classroom hours to deal with these challenges. For students studying business full time, the key is to learn business through the medium of the English language.
For people already active in the workplace and with some understanding of the world of business, often the challenge is finding the time to learn Business English. Furthermore, for managers with a very good business knowledge, their learning experience must reflect this understanding of  business practices and reality. For these students language learning is not an academic exercise but a need to translate familiar business practices into English as quickly as possible. Here the key is to do business in English.
Intelligent Business is a range of business English materials that includes components specifically designed to meet the needs of students who either need to learn business through English or perform familiar business tasks in English. These materials can be used individually or, as they share a core language and skills syllabus, can be used in a variety of combinations described later in this introduction. For an overview of all the Intelligent Business Elementary components, please se fig. 1
As well as sharing a common demand for Business English, both institutional and corporate learning environments are experiencing an increased demand for measurability. Today, both course tutors and training managers are under increasing pressure to measure and demonstrate progress and a return on the investment in Business English learning activities. As this is most effectively done using external, standardise and globally recognised examinations, Intelligent Business Elementary is benchmarked against the Cambridge Business English Certificate Preliminary Level.
Finally, any business English material today need to draw on authentic sources and achieve a high degree of validity in the eyes of the learners and teachers who use them. Developed in collaboration with The Economist Magazine, Intelligent Business draws on this rich source of authoritative and topical articles on the business world.