Individual English language course
To give you an insight of our students and their courses, we asked one of our English trainers to tell us about her work. She recently taught a woman who wanted to increase her English skills in order to interact in her own personal way with English speaking clients and colleagues. This short interview gives an insight in an individual English course at NIOW.
What was the object of this particular course?
"The student requested this course because she had a new job and felt that her level of spoken English was not good enough. Besides, she lacked confidence when she was with colleagues who spoke better English than she did. She was also having to read a lot of documentation in English and was struggling with the language.”
The course was very practical in nature and focused on the needs of the student. “She likes interacting with clients and colleagues in her own personal style,” explains our trainer, “and so she wanted to be able to do this in English in a similar manner to how she operates in Dutch.”
Work was done on:
- different ways of communicating;
- how to act in social situations in English;
- how to make conversation with clients;
- the language of meetings;
- professional vocabulary (to speed up her reading);
- effective email writing;
- relevant grammar.
The emphasis was not directly on grammar as such, because this was not the approach that this student appreciated.
"She made good progress and she directly benefited from the results. This encouraged her a lot!"
So, how did the student manage all this?
“She made good progress and she benefited from the results from the start. This encouraged her a lot and she realized that she needed to be realistic in the way she approached, for example, learning new vocabulary”, explains the trainer. “Because of her busy job and family life, she did not have unlimited time to devote to learning English. She quikcly picked up pointers on how to improve her grammar and learned ways to lift her level of professional vocabulary. This comes in handy if she moves into a job that requires her to have a different area of expertise.” Our trainer continues with the notion that the stundent realized that reading documentation in itself was time-consuming - regardless of the language it is written in (English or Dutch).
What can you tell us about the end result?
“The student now speaks good English and makes very few grammatical mistakes. She still uses fairly simple constructions, so the next step would be to develop a more sophisticated language that she could use if/when appropriate. This would ensure that she could make herself sound more authoritative when discussing complicated financial issues with colleagues or well-informed external contacts. This is something she could easily practise herself or in a future course."