Do you want to know the 3 Advanced Tips to having a Successful language class in an International Workplace? These tips will help your employees, team, and coworkers work together more effectively and understand each other better.
Advanced Tip #1: Get a Real Conversation Started
Make sure that your language instructor is tailoring your employees’ lessons to YOUR specific industry and YOUR specific company. Don’t spend time (and MONEY!) talking about boring, canned topics, but rather your employees’ SPECIFIC needs in the workplace. Our students often have questions about the culture they work with daily and the instructor should be able to give you INSIGHT and understanding into that culture. For example, we teach at a global company that builds bridges and highways all over the world. The company is from Spain, which has a culture, as does every group of people, and now they’ve hired thousands of Americans to work on projects in Texas. There are real life cultural challenges and language challenges happening here, and the instructor must be able to create curriculum for THIS SPECIFIC language and cultural challenge.
You MUST address these questions and learning needs as soon as possible.
You MUST talk with your Global Employees and Coworkers in order to better understanding each other and work together as effectively as possible. An instructor can ease this pain by giving a safe place to ask questions, make mistakes in English, get corrections, bring confusing emails to their lessons for clarification and be able to get real answers about their specific work environment. A private language lesson allows for an open place to learn and to inquire without judgement and with an open mind.
Make sure that you have a language instructor that is open to making customized curriculum and able to dig deep into not only the culture of each employee, but also the culture of the company. Company’s also have their own culture in place that must be learned and adopted in order to be successful and work together well.
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Advanced Tip #2: Demand Dynamic Language Lessons
If students (your employees) are bored in their lessons, then they will not learn. This is a waste of money. Make sure to demand interesting lessons with interesting topics that relate to you.
If your employees don’t like their lessons and the lessons are not applicable to their life, their job and their SPECIFIC language goals, then they will not remember what is being taught. That is a waste of money.
Ask your potential English instructor EXACTLY how he/she will engage your employees during the lessons.
Advanced Tip #3: How Role Playing can Bring the Language Alive and Increase your Vocabulary
Most students are learning a language in a fairly stale environment: a conference room, a small office or the lunch room. These are not necessarily inspiring locations, right? Honestly, it’s all about what the instructor brings to the lesson, especially if the lesson is in a drab board room. Role Play allows for the students to GET OUT OF THE CLASSROOM without leaving the office.
It is important to role play in order to use vocabulary that might not customarily be used in the classroom: checking into a hotel, a tricky phone call (did you know that talking on the phone is the greatest fear of an English learner?), an awkward email and how to approach it, a misunderstanding and how to make it right, and much, much more. All of these situations can be covered in your lesson as long as you give the instructor your specific needs.
DEMAND engaging lessons that specifically have to do with you. Do not settle for programs that give you a textbook and tell you that you’re going to learn what’s in that book and that’s it. We are not all the same! Our companies are not all the same! Our cultures are not all the same!
Make sure you ask if role playing and interesting situations will be played out in your private language lessons. Ask if the instructor will be giving you tips about how others see your culture, the culture you work with and how you see that culture, your company culture, the culture of the city where you’ve moved (San Fran is very different from Boston, even though they’re in the same country, right?), and other specific questions that every newcomer has.
Now that you’ve got the advanced tips for learning languages, I’d like to invite you to get even MORE advanced help with your (free) instant access to “The 7 Deadly Mistakes When Hiring a Foreign Language Instructor”.
If you’re a company that wants its Employees to Work Together More Effectively without Wasting money, then “The 7 Deadly Mistakes When Hiring a Foreign Language Instructor” will help you to have Happy Employees and a Happy Culture AND More Money for your company!