Language Programmes

Building confidence in everyday spoken English: greetings, introductions, shopping, travel, healthcare, and emergency situations. Focus on natural pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation using audio and video materials drawn from real British and American English contexts.

Training the ear to process different English accents (British, American, Australian, Indian), different speaking speeds, and different contexts — formal announcements, casual conversations, instructions, and news broadcasts.

Reading practical and academic English: signs, labels, short news articles, simple academic texts, and professional emails. Developing reading strategies including skimming, scanning, and inferring meaning from context.

The mechanics of English writing from the sentence level up: subject-verb agreement, punctuation, capitalisation, paragraph structure using PEEL, and a basic five-paragraph essay. Students produce progressively longer graded writing tasks.

The 44 phonemes of English, the International Phonetic Alphabet, minimal pairs, word stress, sentence rhythm, and the pronunciation challenges specific to speakers of Portuguese, French, Yoruba, and Swahili.

Systematic acquisition of the most frequently used 2,000 words in English using spaced repetition, context reading, and productive practice. Students keep a vocabulary journal and engage in daily retrieval practice.

Present simple, present continuous, past simple and past continuous, future forms, conditionals, passive voice, and common modal verbs — taught inductively through real texts before grammar rules are stated explicitly.

Writing WhatsApp messages, professional emails, and filling in online forms in English. Navigating websites, apps, and digital services in English. Introduction to business communication register and professional correspondence conventions.

Building a working vocabulary of 5,000 to 8,000 words with a focus on professional, academic, and business contexts. Idiomatic expressions, collocations, phrasal verbs, and the register distinctions between formal and informal English.

Reading university-level texts — journal articles, reports, and case studies. Identifying main argument, supporting evidence, author bias, and implied meaning. Students read one full academic article per week and submit a 400-word critical summary.

Structuring a well-argued academic essay, writing formal reports with executive summaries, academic referencing (Harvard), hedging language, and the differences between academic and professional written English at C1 standard.

Extended listening tasks: academic lectures, TED Talks, BBC documentaries, and professional presentations. Note-taking strategies, understanding fast connected speech, and distinguishing key information from supporting detail in extended discourse.

Structured speaking activities: formal debates, opinion presentations, and professional meeting simulations. Techniques for buying time, agreeing and disagreeing diplomatically, and managing conversational turn-taking effectively in English.

Writing professional proposals and formal correspondence, chairing and contributing to meetings, structuring and delivering business presentations, and handling challenging Q&A sessions in English. Applied to real-world professional scenarios.

Structured preparation for Cambridge B2 First and C1 Advanced examinations: paper format, timing strategy, reading and use of English techniques, writing task types, listening question strategies, and speaking test methodology.

How to conduct independent academic research: database searching, evaluating source credibility, building an annotated bibliography, avoiding plagiarism, and preparing a 2,000-word research paper to university entry standard.