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The key idea behind the course is to help the participants to do their jobs more effectively by improving their business communication skills in English. The British Council CBEC is a unique mixture of business English and soft skills training that uses the Council of Europe’s Framework (CEF) for describing communicative language ability.
The CBEC was introduced in 2008 in Bulgaria and was designed to meet the job-specific business language training needs of Bulgarian organisations. Whether your organisation works in medicine or IT, banking or retail we can deliver the language training you need.
Our experienced course developers conduct a comprehensive needs analysis before the start of the course to build up a picture of how the participants use English at work – and to pinpoint the skills and functional language they need for effective communication in English.
The British Council has its own CEF-based business English level descriptions and these, together with the collated needs analysis data, are used to create customised course syllabuses.
The CBEC does not use ‘traditional’ business English coursebooks, and no two CBEC courses are ever the same. Course materials are put together by our trainers using a combination of:
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The British Council Bulgaria’s Corporate Training resource library |
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The British Council’s global database of business English teaching materials |
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Materials based on the client organisation’s own documentation, e.g. emails sent to – or received from – customers, or Powerpoint presentations |
The CBEC is a practical course designed to improve communicative ability, and each training session uses a communicative approach, focussing on those business skills and communication strategies described in the course’s ‘learning aims’ document.
Each session involves language input and discussion, and builds up to a ‘task’, typically in the form of a roleplay or simulation, that allows participants to practice and demonstrate communicative ability in the most realistic way possible. For example, the task might be to reply to a real-life customer email enquiry, or to present company products at a conference. Everything is relevant to the roles and duties the participants perform at work.
CBEC course participants are assessed using a system of ‘continuous assessment’, in which there are a number of assessed tasks during the course. Participants must complete at least 5 assessed tasks to receive a final grade, while the trainer also takes into account the participants’ overall progress in communicative ability during the course.
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