IT English

This course will develop the English language performance and communicative competence of IT professionals in their dealings with co-workers, consultants and vendors in both domestic and international contexts.

The focus of the course is on practical and effective business English for IT professionals and communication skills may include:

Meetings - Face to Face and Virtual
Negotiations
Making Presentations
Dealing with numbers and numerical data
Telephoning
Socialising and Networking
E-mail, Letter and Report Writing
Cross-cultural awareness

Subject to a placement interview and needs analysis of the participant’s requirements, the course may include vocabulary development in the following areas:

Working with vendors
Working with consultants
Networks and the Internet
IT Support
Data security
Software engineering
Data-mining and the rise of AI
Developments in IT

Skills Focus

There are four basic language skills sub-divided into comprehension (understanding) and production (communication)

Comprehension skills:

Listening
Reading

Production skills:

Speaking
Writing

The chart below is an indication of the focus each of the skills will receive during the course.

Linguistic Focus

Accuracy | Fluency

Of course a user of a language wishes to be as accurate as possible. However, if you listen to a native speaker there are many times when the language used is far from perfect (false starts, incomplete sentences, novel uses of words). In these cases, accuracy is being sacrificed for fluency - in other words, the language is being used to deliver a message, irrespective of the accuracy.

The first bar below is an indication of how accuracy and fluency (in other words, the effectiveness of getting your message across compared to the accuracy of the language) are viewed during this course.

Lexical | Grammatical

Similarly, grammatical accuracy is only part of the language learning equation. Vocabulary has a major impact on users fluency and the way in which individual words interact with one another in specific circumstances should always be taken into account.

The second bar is an indication of the weighting between lexical (vocabulary) items and grammatical items during this course.