Certificate in General & Conversational English

Course details

There are two streams within our language courses. Workplace/Business and Non Workplace/ Business. Both have a heavier emphasis on Speaking and Listening:

• The Workplace/Business stream is intended for those who want to improve their language proficiency in a workplace or business setting. Textbooks and materials are selected with relevant content. Typically, topics covered are sales and marketing, customer service/relations, negotiating skills, presentations etc.
• The Non Workplace/Business stream is intended for those planning to undertake courses for general purposes.

Learning Outcomes

More specifically, the programme aims to improve students’ competence in the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, by working on the following areas. The higher the level, the higher the expectations in demonstrating these competencies:

Reading

• Skimming, scanning, predicting and reading for detail
• Multiple-choice questions
• Sentence, note, table and summary completion
• Recognizing opinions in a passage
• Matching headings, opinions and details to paragraphs
• Understanding reference and substitution
• Completing a map/labelling a diagram
• True/False/Not Given and short answer questions
• Distinguishing fact from opinion
• Identifying sentence function

Listening

• Predicting
• Table, note, sentence and summary completion
• Signposting
• Classification
• Short answer questions
• Multiple-choice questions (including visual multiple choice)
• Paraphrasing

Writing

• Describing graphs, charts and tables
• Process description
• Writing introductions and conclusions for Task 1
• Editing your writing
• Language of comparison
• Essay introductions, arguments and conclusions
• Organizing a paragraph
• Cohesion
• Grammar-tense check

Speaking

• Making notes and preparing for speaking
• Discussing familiar topics
• Describing
• Predicting
• Expressing opinions and preferences
• Comparing and evaluating
• Emphasizing main points
• Taking time to think
• Structuring your response

Vocabulary

• Word List based on the textbook

Pronunciation

• The schwa sound and weak forms
• Word stress, contrastive stress and stress shifting
• Stress in compounds
• Sentence rhythm
• Emphasizing
• Past simple endings

Grammer

• Tenses
• Conditionals
• Modal Verbs
• Superlatives/Comparatives

Certification

Certificate fof Attendance or Certificate of Achievement from CA International College Pte Ltd

Course Content

Our programme aims to improve students’ skills in order to prepare them for both formative and summative assessments. The programmes, which are aimed at candidates whose IELTS band is at least 4.0 is suitable. In general terms, the course will:

• Familiarize students with the expectations of competencies for their respective level..
• Provide students with language skills necessary to successfully achieve their current level.
• Build up students’ vocabulary, which according to published research studies appears to be a significant contributor to the overall assessment performance.
• Increase students’ confidence by replicating real conditions in conversation as often as possible.