First of all, you need to determine whom you want to educate, what the goals are and what short-term and long-term results you expect. Would you like to push your employees to another level, do you need to prepare them for a particular event or do you want to set up education as a part of a benefit scheme in order for the employees to socialise and have fun? Is there an imminent need to improve language skills, so that your employees can do their job in a better way and more efficiently? How often and to what extent do they use the foreign language for work?
Should you have answers to these questions, you can then decide on the education length and intensity requirement. In case you want fast results and noticeable progress, it is vital to pay enough attention to this step. Employees (students) do not stand a chance reaching a significant level of improvement with one lesson (45-60 minutes) per week. If we account for the fact that they occasionally miss a lesson due to an illness, business trip or holiday, it becomes very inefficient. Recommended course intensity is therefore two lessons (of 90 to 100 minutes) twice a week.
Education is an investment. The company invests finance, the employees their time. It is therefore not very smart to set up a never-ending long-term course. A mid-range intensive course is usually more efficient. As an example, I would like to provide a model of a goal-oriented course, which is a great value for the employer as well as an employee:
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6 months intensive course
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6 months course with a lower intensity
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short break
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continuing with level-keeping intensity
Moreover, when the course is well designed and the teacher observes students’ good results, he is naturally further motivated to put even more effort into the education process. Even this side effect of a well chosen intensity increases the quality of the education itself.
If neither the employer nor the employee have an urgent need to improve the language skills, it is beneficial to adjust the intensity and length based on this fact. The results of such education are thus going to be limited. These two designs can be combined. Employer can assign priority to certain employees and provide them with more intensive and long-term education than to others.
The decision-making factor that can help choose the intensity level is students’ present level of knowledge. Students with a lower level (A1- to A2 according to the Common European Framework – CEF, beginners to pre-intermediate) need higher intensity in order to secure stable and significant progress. For students with a higher level (B2 and higher according to the CEF), it’s often better to design short-term education focused on very specific goals.
These can be a part of general knowledge of the target language, e.g. practice of communication skills, expanding active vocabulary in a certain field or mastering particular grammar phenomena. They can also relate to skills needed at work, e.g. telephoning and emailing; the ability to react, oppose and express an opinion at a meeting in the target language, or particular soft skills such as presentation skills, giving and receiving feedback, teamwork, effective communication, etc.
A factor helping set up intensity can also be motivation. Managers can give preference in providing language education to employees who show better performance at work, as a reward.
The employer has the option to postpone a decision about the intensity after the supplier has been chosen, the initial testing has been done and the education institution has been consulted.
How do you know the institution will be the right partner in education? Find out how the institution conducts initial testing. What is the structure of their teaching team? How is the teaching quality checked? Are the teachers further educated by the institution? Last but not least, ask who prepares and continuously checks the methodology plan and education goals. If you want to reach the goals, you should choose the education institution based on these factors, not solely based on the price per hour indicator.
Initial testing should be carried out not only in a written form, but also orally. Written test evaluates only passive knowledge of a language, which often varies significantly from the active knowledge. This is mainly caused by the education approach in our country, which emphasizes and gives preference to receptive skills - reading and listening with comprehension. The effect is then multiplied by a higher number of students in one class. There is often a lack of opportunity to practise the productive skills - speaking and writing.
Oral testing focuses on various language aspects such as ease and scope of language, correct usage of grammatical phenomena, active lexical range, pronunciation and accent. It should also include a needs analysis, which identifies what the student needs the language for, where they have deficiencies and what they actually need to improve. Possibly, it also identifies which area they want to focus on, whether it is general or professional.
In my long-time experience in language education of adults, I have often come across employees expressing the need to study Business English. The issue that arises here is that each person assumes something else when it comes to this term. The usual case was that after several additive questions we came to a mutual conclusion that it is not so.
For instance, in every-day work, the employee communicated regularly and informally with other non-native speakers, so a few lessons focused on useful phrases and structures of his emailing communication would suffice. From the long-term point of view, the student needed to improve his overall knowledge of the target language in order to be able to speak using meaningful sentences and to be understood by others. Taking this into consideration, the employee does not necessary need Business English, which includes formal emailing, formal telephoning phrases, or networking, marketing, headhunting, stress at work, and other topics, as the employee will only have little use for such knowledge.
To return to the topic of initial training, a further step to written testing, oral testing and needs analysis may be cross needs analysis. That means the methodologist or the tester meets up with the manager of each employee and finds out what they think their subordinates need to improve and what their future goals are. Considering that this step is quite time-consuming, I would recommend it only in case there is a big push for fast results.
Based on all of the acquired information from the initial testing the employer receives recommendation how to divide students into groups according to their levels and needs, and a proposal of the concept, content and goals of the education. Let the education commence. Well, almost. This is the time to agree on the days and the times of the lessons with each group.
The most common employer’s requirement is for the lessons to take place before or after the business hours, which is understandable. The reality, unfortunately, shows that morning lessons beginning at 7.30 am quite quickly become unpopular and some of the employees start coming late, which interrupts the lessons and lowers their quality. Sometimes they miss the lessons because they do not want to get up in the morning, which is also understandable considering today’s intense lifestyle. It is similar with the lessons starting at around 4.30 pm. Employees are already exhausted after a long day and their concentration level is usually quite low. These lesson times can thus lead to a considerable progress decline.
When it comes to education as a benefit, it is up to the employee if they make use of the benefit provided under these circumstances and contribute to their language skills improvement. Should the education be goal-oriented, it is recommended to reconsider the outside-of-business-hours requirement and plan the language education in the morning hours, when the level of concentration is the highest, with a sensible start at around 8.30 am.
If you are resetting the whole education system rules, you may as well consider the question of attendance rate and financial participation of the employee. From educational point of view, regular attendance is one of the essential factors, so if the employee falls short of 75% attendance rate, we recommend excluding him from the education process. Student’s financial contribution is not always motivating, but it works for some types of employees.
Language teachers are another aspect I would like to address. If you want to find out more about the options of evaluating the quality of a language teacher, I would like to refer you to one of my previous articles with the title How does a language school evaluate the quality of their teachers? (2016).
One of the most common demands from students regarding their teacher is that they want a native speaker. Such a request is of course relevant but may prove to be quite problematic. High percentage of native speakers who decide to travel to a foreign country to teach their native language do not have any pedagogic education and often not even any teaching experience. Such native speakers have probably never studied their language as such, its rules or structure, therefore they are not able to explain the language items.
You will often hear from them: „We just say it like that.“. Students have a better chance of progress and improvement with a non-native teacher who studied the language, has pedagogical education or training and has several years of experience teaching the target language. Taking into consideration the travelling opportunities these days and the possibilities to live abroad, you often cannot tell whether the teacher is a native speaker or not because they have an acquired native-like accent from abroad.
In conclusion, there are plenty of factors affecting the language education quality. What is it that makes the investment in education worthwhile? Carefully consider whom you want to educate on a regular basis and whom you want to educate at certain point later. Choose a top of the range education institution, which should analyse your employees’ needs, test the students and give you reasonable course proposal afterwards. Seek an institution with the best methodology background. Let the partner in education recommend the best course of action.
That is the way your investment in a happier and more educated team becomes worthwhile.