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Barry Campbell <barry -dot- campbell -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> There is absolutely *no* quick, low-cost fix for this situation, as
> much as your managers would love for there to be.
Right.
> Buying some
> "improve your English now!" workbooks or e-learning courses from the
> corporate training charlatan-of-the-week is a waste of time and money.
True, although contracting for some training with an experienced
English teacher or organisation might be useful. The buzzword is
"ESP", English for Specific Purposes. You want someone who
can develop a course that is fairly specific to the sort(s) of
writing you need.
There's a whole process involved in doing this right. They need to
analyse both the linguistic requirements of the job and the current
skills of potential students before designing the course. This is
time-consuming, requires skill and experience, and is therefore
expensive.
> The best web-based or print resources that will help your engineers
> improve their written English are, well, just about any well-written
> web site, book, newspaper or magazine in English.
But especially anything similar to the sort of writing you expect
them to do.
> The more they read,
> and the more they write, the better they will become... over time. A
> *long* time.
>
> So encourage them to read CNN.com, or the New York Times, or the Wall
> Street Journal, in their downtime,
Also, see what you can add to the corporate library that is relevant.
One company I worked at bought about three shelf-meters of O'Reilly
books on some corporate deal. That would be a fine resource if your
main concern is computer writing. Or subscribe to Byte, Wired, ...
> and when they work on writing
> projects that you're involved with, try to provide as much editorial
> support and feedback as you can. (One-on-one coaching from editors
> can help tremendously, but is resource-intensive, to put it mildly.)
Yes. It might be worth considering contracting out some of that editing.
> Bringing qualified ESL instructors in to the office to provide classes
> would be a good option, but that runs into money. Offering tuition
> support for them to take writing classes at the local community
> college is another good option, but also not cheap.
>
> Again - there *is* no cheap, quick fix.
>
> Hope this doesn't strike you as too pessimistic, but I've been where
> you are right now, more than once.
>
> - bc
>
> --
> Barry Campbell <barry -at- campbell-online -dot- com>
> AOL IM: bcampbellnyc
>http://campbell-online.com
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--
Sandy Harris
Zhuhai, Guangdong, China
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