About this course
English for Specific Purposes starts with a needs analysis, not a coursebook. In week one you bring the real material of your job — a shift handover, a patient history, a tender document, a stand-up meeting, a customer complaint — and the syllabus is written around it.
Common streams: aviation and maritime communications, medical and nursing English, hospitality and tourism, engineering and technical documentation, IT and software teams, finance and accounting.
Closed groups from one workplace are the usual format: six colleagues who share the same vocabulary and the same problems progress faster than six strangers. One-to-one suits people whose role is unusual or whose schedule will not survive a fixed timetable.
The scope and sequence below is the standard shape. Units 3 to 8 are re-written for each cohort after the needs analysis — the skills stay, the content becomes yours.
Who it is for
- Professionals whose English is fine socially but fails under pressure at work
- Teams who need to work in English with colleagues or clients overseas
- Anyone preparing for a role change that adds international responsibility
Entry requirements
CEFR B1 or above, and current or imminent work in the target field.
Scope & sequence
Printable versionThe full teaching map — what is covered, in what order, and how each unit is assessed.
| Unit | Focus | Language | Skills | Assessment | Hrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Needs analysis & baseline | Audit of the real communication demands of your role. Baseline assessment against them. | Register mapping; your own corpus of documents | SpeakingWriting | Needs analysis report and personal syllabus | 4 |
| 2. Field lexis and collocation | Building the 300 words and phrases that carry most of your working day, and the collocations around them. | Domain lexis; noun phrases; abbreviation conventions | ReadingSpeaking | Terminology test | 4 |
| 3. Meetings and briefings | Interrupting, clarifying, checking understanding, and summarising a decision so it is on record. | Hedging; modality; polite disagreement | ListeningSpeaking | Simulated meeting, recorded | 4 |
| 4. Telephone and radio protocol | Communication with poor audio, standard phraseology, and confirming safety-critical information. | Readback and confirmation; the phonetic alphabet where relevant | ListeningSpeaking | Roleplay under degraded audio | 4 |
| 5. Written correspondence | Emails that get a reply, escalation, bad news, and writing for a reader whose first language is not English either. | Formal and neutral register; directness calibration | Writing | Three emails from real scenarios | 4 |
| 6. Reports and documentation | Structuring an incident report, a handover, a specification or a case note so nothing is ambiguous. | Passive and impersonal structures; sequencing; precision | WritingReading | A report from your own workplace | 4 |
| 7. Presenting to a non-expert audience | Explaining technical content to a client, a regulator or a board, and handling the questions afterwards. | Simplification; analogy; signposting | Speaking | Ten-minute presentation with Q&A | 4 |
| 8. Negotiation and difficult conversations | Saying no, pushing back on a deadline, complaints, and repairing a relationship after a mistake. | Conditionals; softening; face-saving language | SpeakingListening | Negotiation roleplay | 4 |
| 9. Cross-cultural communication | Directness norms, silence, hierarchy and humour across the markets you work with. | Pragmatics; intercultural repair strategies | ListeningSpeaking | Case study analysis | 4 |
| 10. Consolidation and skills profile | Integrated simulation across a full working scenario, then a written profile of where you now stand. | Full-course error clinic | ReadingWritingListeningSpeaking | Integrated simulation + skills profile | 4 |
Course hours & duration
Total learning time is about 60 hours. One-to-one students cover the same map at their own pace — most finish in 24–40 hours because the whole session is theirs. ELOQUA Certificate of Completion with a skills profile for your employer.
Course learning outcomes
On successful completion you will be able to:
Pricing
Small group
Per student. Includes the needs analysis and a bespoke syllabus.
One to one
Minimum block of 10 hours. Includes the needs analysis.
The full course delivered privately, at your pace.
All prices in AUD. Payment plans are available on courses over $800 — ask us before you register.
Upcoming intakes
Questions
Can you cover my industry?
Almost certainly. We have run aviation, nursing, law enforcement, hospitality, mining, software and finance streams. If we cannot staff your field properly we will say so rather than improvise.
Can our company book this for a team?
Yes — a closed group of up to six from one workplace is the most common format, and the needs analysis is done with your manager as well as the learners.
Do we need to share confidential documents?
No. We work from redacted or representative material, and everything shared is covered by our confidentiality terms.