3 Essential components for a successful English class at your workplace
We’re always excited when a new client inquires about offering an English classes to their employees, and we’re equally surprised by many corporations’ willingness to implement a hasty plan and be satisfied with a “trial and error” approach to language training.
At Common Ground we specialize in offering industry specific language classes, and our years of experience have taught us that the following 3 suggestions are essential for a successful language class:
- Select your students carefully: Not every employee is right for the English class you are putting together. Â You don’t have unlimited time, nor do you have an unlimited budget; so you need to identify the group of employees who have the best chance for success within your time frame and budget. Â Course “success” can be defined in any way you choose (of course it should match #2 below), but regardless of your goals you want to be sure that your students are as homogenous group as possible (homogenous in their pre-class language ability). Â Too wide of a range in language abilities represented in your class is a recipe for failure every time.
- Set specific goals for the course: Everyone knows that you need to have objectives for your trainings; but we encourage our clients to get more specific than surface goals like “improve communication on the job”, or “increase conversational English”, etc. Â Your goals can be specific, and ought to be related directly to work responsibilities or problem areas at work. Â For example, if one of your common problems at work is the mislabeling of products, then a specific goal of your English class will be the ability to read and understand the commonly used product labels at work.
- Offer an incentive for successful completion and consider a penalty for unsuccessful completion: We were surprised by this one initially as well. Â However it seems to ring true every time after testing it – and it is not culture specific nor specific to a given socioeconomic class. Â This is a training truth that we’ve observed in our Medical Spanish classes and our ESL classes. Â Initially we would offer courses with the “Free English Class” being the incentive, and that seems fair when you look at the cost of offering these language trainings to staff. Â However, those classes were always the ones with 40 – 50% completion rates. Â As soon as incentive plans and penalty plans are put into place, the average completion rate then jumps up to 80%.
It is definitely possible to offer successful English classes to your staff, but don’t leave it up to trial and error to figure out what works best. Â Consider implementing the three components above to position your training for success!