Business English is not for everyone, or How to learn English for Business faster

And how Osmi creates customized courses

Not so long ago most English schools offered only three basic courses — Everyday English, Spoken English and Business English. But in the last few years, we’ve come to realize that the language doesn’t fit in those narrow categories. Often customers have unusual requests or need a personalized approach.

A detailed study plan and engaging lessons are crucial for successful learning and how we create customized and personalized courses for various businesses.

Is it really necessary to customize the material?

A lot of people studied English at school, and many of us hated it. We just couldn’t understand why we had to study gerund or write endless essays that were completely useless outside of the classroom.

And now just imagine that we get clients who are cyberathletes or people who devise spaceships and want to partner up with Elon Musk. There’s a chance they won’t be too excited to discuss the weather or write an essay “About Myself”.

Besides, they will need to focus on different skills. Cyberathletes need to read chat messages at a glance and understand what other team players say to sync the game. Rocket builders need to be fluent in space terminology, read through the documentation and speak with confidence to pitch their ideas to American partners.

A good study plan puts emphasis on necessary skills and makes each lesson interesting and engaging. That way students understand why they take those classes in the first place, become more engaged in the process, which means faster progress in learning the language.

How does Osmi customize English courses?

We start with a roadmap that sets out the goals. The roadmap shows how many lessons students need, which aspects of grammar and vocabulary they want to study and when tests will be taken.

To develop the roadmap, we hold an inquiry, much like in detective films. A content producer and the senior teaching methodology expert meet with the client and ask various questions. Here are the most basic ones:

• What kind of vocabulary do you need?
• What language level do your employees currently have?
• Why do they need to study English?
• What do they already know?
• What do they need to work on?
• What skill is particularly important?
• How will they use the language in the future?

Having got answers to all those questions, we can see the goal and develop a customized roadmap. A roadmap goes a long way! Even if we use already existing lessons rather than develop brand new ones, a roadmap allows us to combine them in a way that they would complement each other perfectly. Without a roadmap we would just have a bunch of lessons that are good as they are but don’t create synergy.

Developing a roadmap is the most important step of the whole process as it determines the success of learning. That’s why it takes quite a long time — from ten days to a month, depending on the level of difficulty, professional field and other factors.

Who creates the roadmap and the content for the courses?

The best team in the world — Avengers — is stronger than any of the superheroes alone. Just like that, we get better results when we work with the client together as a team. For example, a customer can provide a textbook and other learning materials that we’ll use to develop a course.

Why do clients need our help if they already have all the study materials? Just because professional textbooks are infinitely boring, even when you study in a group with a teacher. Each class turns into a battle not only against tricky terminology and unfamiliar skills but also with apathy and boredom. Students start to skip lessons, the process stalls.

We take those materials and turn them into engaging lessons on our Vimbox platform. The lessons are packed with video and audio content and interactive exercises. It’s much more fun to solve puzzles than to read a textbook and repeat new words aloud over and over again. And engaged students don’t skip classes, study regularly and reach their goal faster. It’s worth mentioning that the platform was developed (and is constantly being improved) by Osmi engineers and as for now is without parallel.

How do you create lessons?

Ideas on the structure and content may come from different places. Sometimes I see what will fit the client’s needs best. Then I invite the senior teaching methodology expert for a coffee and explain my idea. It’s important to come to a joint decision as each of us (the senior teaching methodology expert and other methodology expert and I) see the task from different angles.

When we have a common vision, the senior methodology expert and I develop a lesson plan and decide on the content — whether it’ll be an article, an extract from a radio show, a word game, etc. The choice depends on the goal of the course in general and that very lesson in particular.

The methodology experts work on the exercises — dialogues, questions for the articles, audio scripts, etc. They also develop drilling exercises, tests and exams.

Now the lesson is almost ready. We send the materials to designers, find illustrations, record audio materials, etc. With any course, it’s the first lesson that takes the longest to create — at least two weeks from the idea to Vimbox. Then it gets easier, and we can make one or two lessons per week. Before being uploaded to Vimbox, each lesson is edited and proofread.

Who controls the quality?

The quality of lessons in controlled by experts. Usually, it’s a representative of the client — in a large company, there’s always someone who can speak good English while also being familiar with the terminology. Often we ask them for help on tricky translation cases as it’s not enough to know how to teach English if you don’t know the name for a particular spaceship detail. In such cases, an expert can help.

Do you develop each course from scratch?

Developing a customized course is much like building a house. Sometimes you’ll need to develop an individual project and build a house from scratch. But in most cases, it’s enough to order a prefabricated home or even buy a built house, do some renovations and move in.

We don’t always develop brand new courses too. Quite often we build a course using lessons we already have on the platform. For example, a company wants its employees to learn basic grammar in 12 lessons. We have a number of courses on grammar, but they all have two-four times as many lessons. What can we do? We devise a roadmap that will show how to reach the goal in 12 lessons and give it to the teacher. The teacher combines lessons according to the roadmap, and students can reach their goal in the set time.