English for Business Meetings

In English for Business Meetings, you will learn about the concepts and vital terminology necessary for planning and leading a successful business meeting in the English language.  This course will review what to know about your audience in advance, how to start the meeting right, how to design a great meeting, process, tools, how to maximize your group’s potential, how to promote positive communication, managing group conflicts, when to intervene, and how to incorporate graphics into the meeting.  Additionally, you will learn about categories of meetings, roles of participants and documents used in meetings.  We suggest that you also enroll in our Writing Business Letters in English express course in order to learn the essential writing skills needed to compose professional business documents which will be used in your business meeting. 

The Facilitation section reviews facilitative attitudes, the part that facilitation plays in a Spectrum of Group Activities, the job description of a facilitator, the essential skills of a facilitator, role clarification of a facilitator and how to balance dual roles as a facilitator and group leader or member. 

The section, Knowing Your Group, teaches you about group dynamics, group development, roles and behaviors that affect how a group functions and covert as well as overt group issues. 

Getting a Good Start examines how to decide if a meeting is necessary, how to determine whether or not a meeting is necessary, define the desired outcomes, purpose statements and how to prepare a meeting checklist. 

In the Designing a Great Meeting portion, you will learn about ground rules, role definitions, different facilities and locations for meetings, seating arrangements, how to plan agendas, how to open the meeting, tasks to fulfill during a meeting and how to close a meeting. 

The unit, Understanding Process, discusses the process of problem solving, long term and strategic planning, how to plan to achieve your goals, steps in processes and specialized approaches to processes. 

Choosing the Right Tool will examine different types of tools that will help you, tools used for different types of brainstorming, tools for evaluating ideas gathered by different methods, and tools for making decisions. 

In the portion Maximizing Your Group’s Potential, you will be provided with information on how to encourage participation from your group members from start to finish, various means to generate discussions and how to keep groups on track.

The section, Promoting Positive Communication, explores the art of effective questioning, how to reframe language, how to set the tone for a meeting and verbal as well as non-verbal listening skills. 

The Managing Conflict in Groups section looks at sources of conflict, how to prevent unnecessary conflicts, the best ways to intervene in group conflicts, how to use the process of collaborative conflict resolution in groups, how to deal with