Using textbooks to learn and improve at English is very common, and there is nothing wrong with using textbooks as part of a balanced learning program! However, it is also important to include more specific material, such as business books and magazines, and incorporate these into your learning program. In this episode, I explore the importance of such a strategy and I also talk about the concepts of general and specialist vocabulary. So, what about you?  What materials are you using to improve your level of English? Let me know in the comments section below. All the very best! Paul Here is the full transcript: In this episode I’m going to be talking about how to use business books to improve your level of business English. Hi there, I’m Paul Urwin, and welcome to the business English community podcast, where the world of business meets the English language. We discuss culture, strategies, techniques, vocabulary, grammar, and much, much more. Find out more at businessEngliscommunity.com. Hi there, Paul here, and welcome to episode five. Remember, if you are an intermediate or advanced speaker of English and just really looking to take your business English to the next level, then this is the podcast for you. What I try to do is to talk about real business English situations, because I know that that’s what is actually going to help you to improve. After all, we’re going to be experiencing real situations out there. Before we get started, I just wanted to give you a quick reminder to check out our YouTube channel. We’ve got some fantastic videos on there. You can link to the YouTube channel directly from the website and also on the website, you will find a completely free audio book and a completely free online training session. So I suggest you download those if you haven’t already. You can find them of course, at www.businessEnglishcommunity.com. Before we get into today’s main section, I’m just going to give you a word of the week, and this week’s word of the week is brand. B-R-A-N-D, brand. Now this is a great word when it comes to companies and to business English, and a brand is simply a type of product manufactured by a particular company. Some companies have only one brand, and some companies, I can think of Unilever, and Procter & Gamble as a couple of examples. Those companies have many, many different brands operating from the one company. But I really like the word brand, because there are also so many extensions or variations of that word and I’m going to give you just two today. One is brand equity. What is brand equity? Brand equity is commercial value that really comes from customer perception rather than the product itself. It’s coming from the customer’s perception of the brand. What value does that actually have? That’s brand equity. The other one is brand positioning. Brand positioning is a marketing strategy and it’s all about trying to get a brand to occupy a particular space or particular position in the mind of the customer. Often positioning it against other brands to give it it’s own particular space, its own distinct flavor or position, if you like. That’s brand positioning. Brand positioning and brand equity, there are many others, which is why brand is such a great word. On to today’s main topic, which is all about using business books to improve your business English. I want to start out by talking about a traditional English learning method, which involves using course books or textbooks to guide a student from one level to the next. I think these textbooks or these guide books have a really important part to play, and I’m sure that we all learned through textbooks definitely at school, and possibly in other areas of life, such as language learning as well. In the case of English learning, these textbooks are written by experts and they contain great exercises