For professionals in Qatar
English for work is a live online course for professionals in Qatar who use English in meetings, emails, reports, presentations and calls. Each lesson is you and one tutor on Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet. Your level is measured against the CEFR, the Council of Europe's six-level framework, and every lesson rehearses a task from your own working week.
Bring the email you must send tomorrow or the slides for next week's review. The tutor turns that real work into practice, so the English you rehearse is the English you use on Sunday morning.
What we cover
The course follows the places where English carries your work: the meeting room, the inbox, the report, the shared screen and the phone line. Each module starts from your job and your CEFR level.
Modules are chosen and ordered from your role. Someone who writes all day may spend a long stretch on email, while someone who presents weekly may open with talks.
Opening a point, asking for the floor, agreeing with reservations and closing with who does what next. Many learners follow a discussion well and still stay silent, because the moment passes while they build the sentence.
Subject lines that tell the reader what to do, courteous requests, follow-ups and replies to complaints, plus short messages in Teams chat. Tone is the usual trap: a sentence carried over from another language can read as abrupt or stiff.
Structuring a progress report, stating the main point first, describing figures and trends, and trimming long sentences. Learners often save the conclusion for the last paragraph, where a busy manager may never arrive.
Signposting a talk, explaining a chart aloud, keeping to time and taking questions. The prepared part usually goes smoothly; trouble tends to start in the question round, when every answer has to be built live.
Opening and closing a call, checking understanding, spelling names and coping with lag or a frozen screen. The Council of Europe's 2020 CEFR Companion Volume gave online interaction its own scales, a useful yardstick for this module.
Workplaces in Qatar bring together colleagues from many countries, so one meeting may hold several accents of English. You train your ear on varied voices and learn to request a repeat gracefully.
Word stress, sentence stress and the sounds that change meaning at work, such as thirteen and thirty. The goal is speech that colleagues understand the first time, in the accent you already have.
The vocabulary of your sector, from engineering and healthcare to finance and hospitality, together with the grammar of work updates: present perfect for progress, modal verbs for requests, passives for procedures.
How lessons run
Each lesson is built around a task already in your diary. The tutor finds your level first, plans with you, rehearses real situations and then checks what has changed in your English at work.
Step 1
The first lesson places your listening, reading, speaking and writing on the Council of Europe's scale from A1 to C2. Skills often sit at different levels: a professional may read reports at B2 and speak in meetings at B1.
Step 2
You name what lies ahead: a quarterly report, a client call, an appraisal, a conference talk. The tutor orders the modules around those dates so that the rehearsal lands before the real event.
Step 3
The tutor meets you on whichever platform your office already uses: Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom. On Teams, for instance, you practise screen sharing, muting and chat in the window of your real meetings; phone practice happens with cameras off.
Step 4
The tutor marks the phrases that landed well and reworks the ones that caused confusion. You keep corrected versions of your own sentences, ready to paste into the next email or say in the next meeting.
Step 5
At points you agree on, the tutor returns to the CEFR descriptors. A statement such as 'I can take an active part in discussion in familiar contexts' shows plainly what you can now do in a meeting.
Slots follow the Qatari working week in Qatar time (UTC+3): before work or after it from Sunday to Thursday, or a quieter hour on Friday or Saturday.
What we look for in a tutor
Every tutor for English at work meets these standards.
Precise knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and usage, with the ability to explain why one phrasing sounds courteous and another sounds curt.
Familiarity with how meetings, emails, reports and presentations are organised in English, and with what colleagues expect from each.
Working knowledge of the Council of Europe's levels and descriptors, used to place a learner accurately and to describe progress in published, shared terms.
A background in teaching adult learners, who arrive with limited time, a clear purpose and real work that cannot wait.
Grammar and tone explained plainly, with Arabic available for explanations whenever a learner finds it quicker, while the practice itself happens in English.
Common difficulties
These difficulties come up again and again among working adults.
Building a complete, correct sentence in your head takes longer than the pause between two speakers.
How a tutor helps
The tutor gives you short openers such as 'Can I add something here?' and runs mock meetings full of interruptions until stepping into the discussion feels automatic.
Politeness habits travel badly between languages, so a direct translation can sound demanding or bury one request under three paragraphs.
How a tutor helps
You bring real drafts with confidential details removed. Together you rewrite them with softening phrases, a subject line that states the purpose and the request in the opening lines.
Compressed audio strips away facial clues, and colleagues in Qatar speak English shaped by many first languages.
How a tutor helps
Listening practice draws on varied accents, and you rehearse check-back lines like 'So, to confirm, you need the file by Thursday?' until clarifying feels natural.
Pairs such as fifteen and fifty blur on a weak line, and spelling a name aloud is rarely practised.
How a tutor helps
Short drills cover stress in numbers, the spelling alphabet and reading figures back, followed by the habit of confirming key figures in the chat or a follow-up email.
A prepared talk has a script. Questions arrive without one, in front of an audience that is waiting.
How a tutor helps
The tutor predicts likely questions from your slides, you practise phrases that buy thinking time, and you rehearse the whole talk on a shared screen.
Questions learners ask
Describe your role, the tasks you find hardest and your usual hours. A person reads it and replies with a tutor suited to your level.