Secretaries & Administrative Staff

Vocabulary is of paramount importance and therefore the focus is placed on using the correct vocabulary at the appropriate time and within the correct context, ensuring effective communication between work colleagues, customers and suppliers. An emphasis is placed on real work situations using business terms and expressions, including abbreviations and colloquial expressions.

Speaking skills development activities simulate real-life communication, such as describing basic company information, arranging meetings and setting agendas, message-taking and other basic administrative functions. These are practiced using role-play and information gap tasks that involve finding out information from a partner.

Grammatical structures are introduced and reviewed according to the needs of students. Areas such as imperatives and message-taking are introduced to prepare learners for real life situations. Discovery learning activities are favoured where students are encouraged to notice and work out structural patterns rather than learn rules that have little or no practical application.

Reading and listening skills are developed through tasks that involve studying authentic and simplified authentic-type texts. Listening texts prepare students for communication with native speakers and non-native speakers by using recordings that contain different accents and regional variation. Written tasks aim to motivate students by developing their knowledge of useful language phrases and vocabulary chunks for different text types such as meeting requests, written notices and message-taking. Written exercises are used to reinforce vocabulary and grammatical.