How was your weekend?
Dieser Schreckmoment am Telefon “Hello, this is Cathie from Microsoft, can I talk to Mr Roman Shaccerl?” wird ab sofort der Vergangenheit angehören. Beim Business English Training mit Mark Heath verloren wir die Scheu vor dem Sprechen in Englisch und redeten einfach drauf los.
Der Kurs fand aufgrund des großen Interesses in zwei Gruppen statt. Hier folgen die Berichte der beiden Business-English-Teams und wir starten mit der 13 Uhr Gruppe, Kathrin Enzenhofer sagt darüber:
Back to school - but funnier
It all started like many of our events, projects and activities come about: Somebody meets someone somewhere and sets up something - and connections are made. That somebody was Philipp and the acquaintance he made at a party was native speaker Mark Heath from England.
Because we often talk about improving our English and making communication in English common again, with customers and among each other, he took the opportunity and asked Mark if he could imagine improving softaware’s business English! - so….. back to school!
A few days later, Gabriele and Roman organised the coaching and we were split into two groups – the participation was voluntary, of course. The lessons came along every week, for one and a half hours, ten times.
Mark is a veeeeery funny, approachable and handsome man, who is a genuine story teller. Every lesson started with “What did you do on the weekend?” – and we often really had troubles to remember, but we also found out even more about our colleagues and that was something I really liked. It was kind of „team building“ too. The lessons were pretty varied, so there were some where we just talked, told stories and joked around (for example about the Americans, especially Mark:😛) and there were some lessons, which were very much like school: we learned and discussed some helpful phrases for work, expanded our vocabularies and the usage and meaning of some common „wrongly“ used phrases and words.
All in all, this was a great alternative to our daily work routine were we could challenge ourselves in a new way.
Mark once said to me: „If you think too much about how you say this in English, it will come out awkwardly. When you speak with your heart, it often turns out correctly.“ And I guess he is right, it‘s all about talking, talking, talking and not being ashamed when you make a mistake and with Mark you never felt dumb or uncomfortable and he didn‘t make this into a strict-school-feeling .
We even consider initiating one English speaking day a week to keep the things we learned and make it more common.
Great thanks to Mark and to Gabriele and Roman.
Vom 14:30-Kurs berichtet Daniel Sklenitzka:
English everywhere
When you are a software developer, English is by far the most important language. Code is written in English. Documentation often is only available in English, and even when there are translations, most developers find it easier to read the English original. Blog posts and conference talks are published in English. Being able to communicate in English is essential for professional software developers.
Thankfully, there are many opportunities to train your language understanding: reading English literature, watching movies and series in their original version, listening to podcasts or audio books, …
Talking, on the other hand, can be quite hard to practice when there’s no native speaker around to provide feedback. This is where Mark Heath, our English trainer for the last 10 weeks, comes in.
While we also covered some grammar and theory (like the various differences between British and American English), his main focus was getting people to talk. From the first minute on (“How was your weekend?”) he encouraged us to recount, ask, answer, give feedback, formulate, form sentences, do small talk and discuss in different exercises. And the best thing about it: It was really, really funny as well!
Wie deutlich zu erkennen ist, können sich die meisten von uns nun eloquenter und sicherer in Englisch ausdrücken und haben die Scheu vorm Einfach-Drauflos-Quatschen verloren. Das ist der tollen Ermutigung unseres Trainers Mark Heath von eventsassociate geschuldet. Herzlichen Dank, lieber Mark, dass du uns so hilfreich unterstützt hast!
