My Three Activities to Promote English Language in My Workspace

I work at an IT company in Tokyo and I’m in charge of smartphone application development and the project management. I’m sure you all know the importance of studying English in your daily life, and i think it’s getting no exception in my industry as well. Today I want to tell you about my three activities to promote English Language in my workspace.

The first activity is about reading English documents with my co-workers.

IT technology has improved so rapidly since the first iPhone launched a decade ago. The device and OS updates became already an annual event and I have to make my apps compatible with the new specs every year. Above of all, it’s getting harder to follow the latest information. I used to able to rely on the Japanese documents, however, nowadays it’s too late to wait for such translations to catch up them in time. That’s why I started a meetup for reading the latest English documents.
In the meetup, we read and translate the documents into Japanese in turns. It’s not only to share the meanings of the sentences but also our knowledge which are related to the contents. This approach was also good to let my co-workers know how much useful to study English to expand their knowledge earlier than ever before.

The second is about speaking opportunities.

I often read English tech documents, but my company is so domestic that I have no opportunity to speak out English on business. As one of the solutions, I started an English conversation circle in my workspace. Every Thursday lunch time, we gather in the main meeting room and talk about weekly topics in English only. My co-workers didn’t have such opportunities, either, so they really understood how easy English phrases they couldn’t speak out and it motivated them to improve their English skill more.

The last is about inviting a native speaker.

The English conversation circle in my workplace is a good way to improve our speaking skills, but it is not enough to improve the accuracy of English because we are still studying English. So I decided to invite a native speaker and ask for teaching us English and I could do it fortunately. Now he comes to our office every other Tuesday, and we can learn what we should know as a non-native speaker, and always know new words and expressions from various topics and situations on the well-experienced teacher’s lessons.

That’s it. No big deal. Although yet only few co-workers empathy my ideas, I’m gonna keep on trying.