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On Your Feet and Speaking Effectively
Designed for both native and non-native speakers of English who need to:
handle customer service calls, train others, present information formally
and informally to co-workers. In this class, participants get on their
feet, speak within a small group, and review their delivery on video tape.
This practice reduces nervousness and builds confidence and clarity. Employees
give short presentations, act as a facilitator, and speak spontaneously
by choosing a surprise topic.
In an interactive team environment, participants learn to:
- Speak clearly using techniques for speech rate and melody
- Give briefings or presentations in front of a group
- Learn how to make effective visuals
- Initiate and respond to questions spontaneously
- Evaluate personal and peers' communication skills
- Organize material through a structured format
- Use effective nonverbal communication through video tape
- Receive personalized feedback from the instructor
Audience: Sections for native and non-native English speakers
3 hours/week, 6 weeks (6-12 participants)
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Vocabulary Builder
In business you need to be articulate and fluent in order to communicate
effectively with your customers and colleagues. Knowing the words that
express your meaning clearly and precisely will help. In this class, native
and non-native English speakers learn useful new business vocabulary and
strategies for continuous vocabulary building. Through newspaper articles
and other resources, you will see how a word is used; then you will practice
using the word in your own speech and writing. Interactive team exercises
motivate you to increase your memory and word capacity.
- Learn at least 20 useful new nouns, action and description words per
week
- Unlock a word's meaning by analyzing its Greek & Latin parts
- Use context clues to predict meaning
- Use jokes, wordplay, and interesting word origins to help you improve
your memory for new vocabulary
- Select from several techniques to discover the best way to continue
vocabulary building
Audience: Sections for native and non-native English speakers
2 hours/week, 6 weeks (4-12 participants)
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Accurate Writing (formerly Grammar at Work)
You may be sending the wrong message because of inaccurate grammar or
an unclear writing style. Some people simply do not feel confident about
getting their ideas accurately into writing.
In this class, native and non-native speakers of English review and practice
correct grammar and develop the confidence and skill to send clearer and
more accurate e-mail, memos, and reports to their customers.
In this class participants will:
- Review and practice grammar structures in interactive, oral and written
exercises
- Learn the steps for organizing a clear and accurate message
- Learn how to identify and correct common writing errors
- Practice re-writing inaccurate business memos, letters and emails
- Use self-editing techniques in correcting your own writing errors
- Get specific instructor feedback on your writing
Audience: Sections available for native or non-native English
speakers
2 hours/week for 9 weeks (4-12 participants)
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Effective Writing
In this class you will strengthen your writing skills by reviewing and
practicing correct grammar and by learning to organize information for
clearer and more reader-friendly e-mail, memos, and reports. You will
learn general business writing techniques and apply these to work-related
writing projects from your own. You are encouraged to bring in your on-the-job
documents to work on in class.
In this class participants will:
- Learn the essentials of a good report
- Rewrite letters and memos to adjust for appropriate tone
- Construct complex sentences and varying sentence length
- Combine sentences and paragraphs effectively with transitions and
connectors
- Build vocabulary and modulate tone and style
- Edit for grammar and usage hot-spots
- Get instructor feedback on their own e-mail, reports or other writing
Audience: Sections available for native or non-native English
speakers
2 hours/week for 9 weeks (4-12 participants)
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One-on-One Training
Clear, persuasive speaking and writing skills are critical for technical
professionals to build influence and transmit their ideas to internal
and external colleagues and customers. Speak Up consultants coach individuals
on work-related objectives identified in the initial assessment.
Pronunciation
For pronunciation objectives, we use audio tape and software tools to
enable the individual to become aware of speech melody, rhythm and articulation.
Then he or she practices the newly learned skills in simulated on-the-job
communication situations with audio or video tape.
Presentations
Another objective might be presentations: The individual learns a process
to analyze the audience and to craft appropriate presentations for different
groups. We use videotape feedback to help the individual develop a clear,
interesting delivery, confident body language and effective use of visuals.
Writing
If writing is identified as an objective, the individual will work on
grammar and mechanics or polish organization and style. Individuals
learn to edit their own writing and will practice company-specific writing
using on-the-job documents, such as e-mail, reports and scientific papers.
Intercultural
To be effective at the highest level, business professionals need to
be able to interpret intercultural nuances and to modify communication
style for different audiences. Individuals in the one-on-one program
will receive intercultural coaching in the context relevant to their
needs: To attend international meetings; to prepare for a presentation
to a multicultural audience or for conferencing with a client from a
different country.
1-1.5 hour sessions
Schedule to be determined by participant and trainer
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Communicating Across Cultures
This course introduces employees to essential intercultural communications
skills for working effectively with co-workers and customers from different
cultures. Participants will learn how to improve working relationships
through experiential methods including simulation, role-play and small
group exercises in a safe, non-confrontational environment.
Participants in this course will:
- Become aware of their own cultures and the unwritten rules that shape
daily communications
- Learn about the cultural backgrounds of co-workers and customers—differences
in customs, values and perceptions of the work process
- See how stereotyping can color perceptions and the ability to communicate
- Understand how different communication styles can invite or discourage
the response you want in daily interactions
- Practice intercultural listening and modifying English so that customers
get the point clearly and politely
Audience: All employees and managers
One-day workshop (9-18 participants)
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Oral Communication Strategies
Professionals need to know appropriate English strategies and business
idioms in order to develop valuable workplace relationships and influence
customers. These will convey the friendly, informal style that gets results
in North American business interactions.
Using interactive oral exercises with business examples, participants
will:
- Be aware of cultural differences in style
- Learn phrases for idioms for social and business situations
- Practice interrupting and disagreeing politely
- Use strategies for persuading others
- Present point of view in a concise manner
- Respond to customer questions and win over resistant audiences
- Participate in simulated meetings
- Learn how to build idiomatic business vocabulary
- Discuss cultural tips for handling sensitive situations
Audience: Sections available for Native or Non-native English
speakers
One-day workshop (4-16 participants)
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E-mail Booster Workshop
This workshop will help you build the excellent writing skills you need
to communicate effectively with your customers and coworkers, especially
in the fast and time-sensitive world of e-mail communication.
E-mail has exploded into the workplace as the way most people exchange
information-- It's quick, efficient, and informal, and perfect for instant
messaging. At the same time, e-mail is also used to send more formal documents
such as contracts, proposals, reports and employee communications. For
these more complex and formal writing jobs, well-organized, reader-focused
writing is especially critical.
In this class you will:
- Review the appropriateness of email: When to use email communication
and when to avoid it
- Review the guidelines for polite electronic communication: Netiquette
- Learn to write concise and helpful subject lines
- Learn and use simple techniques to organize your email message
- Edit your own emails for customer focus, clarity, conciseness and
correctness using a specially designed checklist
- Get peer and instructor feedback on your email writing
Audience: All employees and managers
Half-day workshop (4-12 participants)
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The Grammar Workout
In this fun and fast-moving class, you will improve your credibility and
polish your oral communication skills. Interactive exercises, peer and
instructor feedback will help you identify and correct your own grammar
hot spots. You will also learn to construct clear, easy-to-follow sentences
for your customers.
Topics and activities:
- Discover your hot-spots
- Review and practice standard usage for pronoun case, verb tense, subject/verb
agreement
- Learn the difference between Standard English and Black English dialects
- Do pair and group exercises to practice changing your speech
- Find out tips and techniques for remembering the rules
- Learn self-study strategies and resources for ongoing practice
Audience: Recommended for native English speakers
Half-day workshop (4-12 participants)
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Pronounced Difference
Persuasive speaking requires a vocal style that is clear and dynamic and
includes these elements:
- Expressive melody
- Controlled rate
- Smooth phrasing
- Active tongue, lip and jaw movements
- Clear consonant and vowel sounds
- Good voice projection
This half-day workshop is for professionals who want assess their voice
clarity and expressiveness and learn quick strategies for improvement.
Participants understand key clear speech concepts and apply them in structured
pair and group exercises.
With trainer and peer feed back, individuals become aware of their own
speech melody, rhythm and articulation and begin to change ineffective
voice habits. By the end of the day, participants will have a profile
of their speech strengths and weaknesses and will know resources for continued
learning.
Audience: Non-native English speakers
Half-day workshop (4-16 participants)
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The Writing Workshop
This 3.5-hour workshop will help you build the writing skills you
need to communicate effectively with your customers and coworkers. Writing
demands a more well-organized, audience-focused and concise approach to
communicating than speaking does and thus, offers some unique challenges.
This workshop will give you the basic tools needed to write effectively
and efficiently in today's workplace.
In this class you will:
- Learn to change your writing style and tone for different readers
- Practice the 4 C's of good writing: Customer Focus, Clarity, Conciseness
and Correctness
- Use a simple technique to organize your ideas quickly
- Learn to write effectively using fewer words and more active verbs
- Brush up on common writing errors that many of us make
- Edit your own writing for customer focus, clarity, conciseness and
correctness using a specially designed checklist
- Get peer and instructor feedback on your writing
At the end of the workshop, you will have the option of setting up a 30-45
minutes one-on-one coaching session with the trainer to get extra help with
your written communication needs. This meeting should be scheduled within
two weeks of the workshop date. Before the coaching session, we ask you
to send the trainer at least three pieces of writing that you would like
to go over in the session.
Audience: All employees and managers
Half-day workshop (4-12 participants)
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Writing Workshop:
Employee Self Assessments for Performance Reviews
This is a special half-day writing workshop for employees who would
like coaching to prepare the self-assessment portion of their upcoming
performance reviews. In this small-group class, the trainer will lead
you through exercises to organize your many tasks into clear descriptions
of your accomplishments. You will practice using specific, action-oriented
words and learn strategies to improve the impact of your writing. Bring
your objectives from last year's review.
Audience: All employees and managers
Half-day workshop (4-12 participants)
Writing Workshop:
Manager Assessments for Performance Reviews
In this workshop, managers will walk through the performance review writing
process and learn strategies to write clear, tone-sensitive reviews. You
will practice using appropriate language to describe strengths and accomplishments
as well as areas that need improvement. You will also get trainer coaching
in articulating desired performance, goals and objectives. In order to
protect confidentiality, please remove names or identifying designations
from any sample reviews you bring to this workshop (You may bring 2)
Audience: All employees and managers
Half-day workshop (4-12 participants)
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Team Talk
Develop the language and culture skills necessary to become a confident
and contributing team member. Learn American culture etiquette and verbal
strategies for holding the floor, disagreeing, interrupting and more.
Every successful business person must be a team player!
Team members will be more confident and assertive when participating
in meetings, will collaborate more effectively, and will project a more
professional image.
Using discussion, structured practice and meeting simulations in an interactive
team environment, participants:
- Learn specific phrases and idioms to use at meetings
- Learn how to present an opinion in a strong or neutral manner
- Learn tactful ways to disagree and interrupt
- Learn how to ask someone to clarify a point
- Learn how to express degrees of importance and certainty
- Learn ways to persuade others to consider their viewpoints
- Use eye contact, facial expression, posture and gestures to show confidence
and facilitate meaning
Audience: Non-native English speakers
Format 15 hours (2 or 4 sessions) (8-14 participants)
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Speak Up! 1 Fundamentals
Designed for beginning-level non-native English learners who need to develop
the skills necessary to interact with supervisors about safety, instructions
and processes.
This course provides the minimum required speaking, reading, and writing
skills necessary to participate in the Speak Up!
2, Read It!, and Write
On! programs. It integrates pronunciation and grammar, and incorporates
workplace vocabulary for tools, equipment, safety and job processes.
Participants learn to:
- Introduce themselves and others
- Name and locate tools, equipment, and safety equipment
- Give and understand safety warnings
- Ask for help
- Describe job skills
- State job process steps
- Describe simple problems
- Understand and give one- and two-step instructions
- Request repetition
- Ask clarifying questions about instructions
- Call in sick
- Identify parts of speech and basic sentence structure
- Alphabetize with first and sequential letters
- Scan to quickly find specific information in text and visuals
- Read text and put steps in logical order
- Recognize and spell high frequency workplace words
- Enter appropriate information on workplace forms
Audience: Beginning level non-native speakers
4-6 hours/week, 90-120 hours total (8-14 participants/class)
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Speak Up! 2A
This course focuses on the oral language skills necessary to interact
with supervisors and team members about problem solving, process improvement,
and team building. Built around key workplace language functions, the
course integrates pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary development.
Participants learn to:
- Show understanding through verbal and non-verbal cues
- Give multiple-step instructions
- Ask clarification questions about instructions
- Use formal and informal phrases to ask for help
- Say "no" politely.
- Create flowcharts of job processes
- Describe problems clearly and completely
- Suggest solutions to problems at work
- Use a variety of phrases to state opinions
- Use reasons to support opinions
- Agree and disagree in group discussions
Audience: Intermediate level non-native speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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Speak Up! 2B
This course builds on the skills learned in Speak
Up! 2A, with greater emphasis on talking about problems, quality,
and process issues. Built around key workplace language functions, the
course integrates pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary development.
Participants learn to:
- Initiate conversations
- Check for understanding
- Admit mistakes and give explanations
- Correct others' mistakes
- Describe problems clearly and completely
- Ask questions about problems
- Describe troubleshooting steps taken
- Use fishbone analysis to discuss problems
- Talk about cause and effect
- Make suggestions to improve processes
- State opinions and support them with reasons
- Ask for others' input
- Paraphrase information to facilitate understanding
- Ask clarification questions about company benefits
Audience: Intermediate level non-native speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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For beginning readers, see Speak Up!1 Fundamentals.
Read It! 2A
Built around essential workplace reading skills and tasks, this course
integrates dictionary skills, vocabulary development, and continuous learning
strategies.
This course focuses on reading skills for task completion (reading for
doing). Unlike reading classes for native speakers of English, ESL reading
classes include more work in vocabulary development, letter and sound
recognition, cultural references and processing words and sentences.
Participants learn to:
- Look up word definitions using sequencing and guide words
- Read sequential process instructions to complete a task
- Scan to locate essential information in a document
- Read tables, charts and schematics to complete workplace tasks
- Use the dictionary to figure out word meaning and synonyms
- Use the dictionary to figure out pronunciation of workplace words
- Ask for clarification about word meaning
- Figure out meaning from prefixes and suffixes
- Build vocabulary through word families
- Guess word meaning from context
- Skim to understand the general idea
Audience: Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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Read It! 2B
This course builds on the reading skills learned in Read
It! 2A with greater emphasis on reading workplace documents, including
flowcharts, benefits brochures and process instructions.
Participants learn to:
- Read for meaning instead of reading word by word
- Identify the most important part of sentences
- Guess the meaning of words from context
- Use dictionary tools to learn new vocabulary
- Use word families to decode meanings of words
- Identify the writer's point of view
- Identify imperative and permissive tense in workplace and benefits
documents
- Summarize key information
Audience: Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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For beginning writers, see Speak Up!1 Fundamentals.
Write On! 2A
This course is designed around common workplace writing demands: workplace
forms, e-mail, memos, reports and performance reviews. Grammar, vocabulary,
spelling and sentence structure are integrated into all class writing
tasks.
Participants learn to:
- Write descriptions about problems on forms and in e-mail
- Fill out evaluation forms
- Format e-mail for ease of reading
- Make written suggestions for improvement
- Use a computer keyboard to write short e-mail
- Write for a specific audience
- Apply e-mail etiquette
- Correctly spell and use high-frequency workplace vocabulary
Audience: Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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Write On! 2B
This course builds on the skills developed in Write
On! 2A, with a greater emphasis on writing email with a clear
purpose to meet the needs of the reader. Grammar, vocabulary, spelling
and sentence structure are integrated into all class writing tasks.
Participants learn to:
- Generate ideas in writing
- Identify the reader's needs
- Organize email writing for clearer communication
- Identify most important information in written communication
- Apply standard formats to email communication
- Correctly form compound and complex sentences
- Identify and correct improper verb forms
Audience: Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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Say It With Confidence!
Designed to address the assertive communication skills manufacturing
employees need to speak up and present a professional image at work. The
course integrates basic intercultural communication skills, grammar, and
pronunciation.
Participants learn to:
- Paraphrase to show understanding
- Ask clarification questions
- Clarify misunderstandings
- Interrupt to get more information
- Identify their personal communication styles
- Identify cultural barriers to presenting a strong, confident image
- Use American intonation patterns to show confidence
- Use word stress to show what ideas are important
- Disagree politely
- Identify and discuss their strengths
Audience: High Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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Talk It Over, Now!
This course gives manufacturing employees the language, communication,
and confidence necessary to talk about and resolve minor interpersonal
and intercultural problems in the workplace.
Participants learn to:
- Talk about their own cultures
- Ask questions about others' cultures
- State similarities and differences between own and other cultures
- Identify intercultural problems in the workplace
- Use appropriate language to describe cultural problems
- Identify differences in body language across cultures
- Describe the company's work culture
- Answer questions about interpersonal problems they experience at work
- Explain an interpersonal problem
- Identify the steps necessary to resolve an interpersonal problem
- Use appropriate language to resolve an interpersonal problem
Audience: High Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-14 participants/class)
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Pronunciation in American English
This course develops clearer pronunciation of English by applying
correct stress, intonation, and rhythm to workplace vocabulary and conversations.
Employees learn to articulate sounds and word endings so they can get
their messages across clearly.
Participants learn to:
- Apply thought grouping to a self introduction
- Stress key words when reporting an injury on the line
- Use falling pitch when offering suggestions in a meeting
- Use key word stress when describing unsafe conditions at work
- Use appropriate word stress patterns when giving instructions
- Demonstrate rising and falling pitch patterns when asking about benefits
- Use "wh" questions to correct misunderstandings
- Pronounce final -s in 10 high-frequency words
Audience: Intermediate non-native English speakers
4 hours/week, 12 weeks (8-12 participants/class)
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