With the business world becoming increasingly ‘global’ and with English now well established as the international business language, learning English as a second language is becoming vital for those who want to further their careers. Within this context, research by Dr Charles Browne, Professor of Applied Linguistics and the Director of the English as a Foreign language (EFL) Teacher Education Program at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, points to EFL learners encountering serious problems in learning sufficient English vocabulary via traditional delivery methods.

Dr Browne, who is an acknowledged specialist in computer assisted language learning (CALL) and second language vocabulary acquisition, is leading a webinar to outline his cutting edge research into the quickest and easiest ways to acquire business English proficiency.

During the webinar – which takes place on Thursday 20^th September from 11am to noon European Time (10am to 11am British Summer Time), is free to attend and is being facilitated by goFLUENT, a leading provider of Business English training – Dr Browne will reveal some basic findings regarding language learning, outline some of the problems faced by EFL learners related to vocabulary, and demonstrate important online tools that help teach important vocabulary and reading content.

These special online learning materials include authentic and motivating listening and reading content; graded materials and tools to help learners understand videos that are couched in language above their level of understanding. Webinar participants will learn how tools like video captioning ‘keyword’ captioning; ‘automaticity’ (decreasing the cognitive load placed on learners by deleting less important and less well known vocabulary), bilingual captioning, clickable HTML directories  and speed control, can aid in taking them to the next level of English training.

To register for the free webinar, visit http://www.gofluent.com/web/us/webinar-charles-browne

“Estimates of the number of words in the English language vary from 1,000,000 to at least 350,000 – depending on your definition of what is a ‘word’,” said Professor Browne. “Of these, a typical native speaker of English knows some 20,000. A key problem for those learning English as a foreign language is that they don’t know enough ‘high frequency’ words – that is, those words that occur most frequently in English.

“It’s thought that someone learning English needs to know at least 5,000 English words before they can begin to study the language independently. Yet, after around two thousand hours of ‘traditional’ language learning, top international students had managed to learn only some 4,000 English words” he revealed.

Comment: Of course, it’s not just those who speak English as a foreignlanguage who need to enlarge their vocabulary to more than 5,000 words. Some understanding of grammar, punctuation and spelling would help too. Maybe Professor Browne, goFLUENT and others would also

Dr Charles Browne.

like to turn their attention to these other opportunities to fill gaps in the market – and improve the standard of everyone’s English.