Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

in nature meant that each time we were able to respond to feedback from allstakeholders both during and after each course, in an attempt to further improveand refine the package.The need for a CBEC arose from discussion with the client stakeholders about theneed for improved English combined with a focus on US-style customer servicesdelivery to their expectant clients. This would enable the company to retain clients,exceed expectations and meet their corporate objectives. The course participantswere usually male, under 30, graduates of technical universities, and mainly Bulgarianfirst language speakers, but there were also a number of Turkish and Armenianspeakers. Despite generally having CEFR B1 and above levels of English, manyservice engineers had limited overseas experiences in English-speaking contexts.Our small Bulgarian teaching centre had an excellent mix of experienced, wellqualifiedtrainers, managers and a teaching centre manager who was supportive ofproduct innovations, provided decisions were pedagogically grounded. We workedhard to develop relationships with clients and met prior to and after every course todiscuss feedback and improvements. We also conducted a mid-course satisfactionsurvey to enable us to monitor, and respond to, participant concerns. This structuredapproach to client/service provider relationships meant we were afforded certainliberties and could innovate with the course, using experimental practices that wereconsidered valid.An evolving partnershipInitial (non-CBEC) courses began at Siemens in 2004, and were standard, general,or business English courses that followed a coursebook and provided training tolanguage-level groups of up to 16 participants. These courses were 48 hours inlength with 24 two-hour classes taking place face-to-face at Siemens’ offices,two or three times a week, in the evening before their participants’ shifts began.From this initial stage the CBEC (v2 below) was developed in response to theparticipants’ and client’s concerns that the course was not linked to their specificneeds. We added elements that were based on the functional English and softskillrequirements of participants’ working lives (for example dealing with an upsetcustomer on the telephone, or replying to an email enquiry) as well as including amore telecoms/IT-specific language focus.The client demanded faster and greater improvement in their engineers’performance, particularly in the quality of emails they were writing. This requiredus to employ our resources more flexibly to meet their demands. The participantsthemselves were finding the longer courses hard going, as they were either beforeor after their night shifts. We were seeking ways to add value to this CBEC, withoutincreasing our peak hour workload, whilst also cutting down on the cross towntravelling we were doing. The idea of using technology to add flexibility to our offerseemed to make sense, both pragmatically and potentially pedagogically. One of theways to assist participants with their writing was to give feedback on participants’real-work writing, perhaps at an early draft stage.156 | A longitudinal case study of the ‘blends’