Business English 1-on-1: What to Bring to Class

A business English one-on-one lesson is an hour of undivided attention from a trained teacher, and it is the most valuable thing on a professional's timetable in the Philippines. It is also the easiest hour to waste, because an empty hour defaults to a textbook, and a textbook defaults to a company that does not exist negotiating a contract you will never sign.

The difference between a business course that changes your Monday morning and one that does not is almost entirely the material. So bring your own — real, specific, and stripped of anything confidential.

Here is what to pack, in the order it gets used.

1. A recording of yourself failing

Two minutes of your own speech, recorded before you fly, in the situation that actually goes wrong. Talking through last week's numbers. Explaining your role. Answering a question you were not ready for.

Do not script it and do not re-record it until it sounds good. The version where you hesitate, restart, and use the same three connectors nine times is the diagnostic. A teacher who hears it in the first class can tell you within ten minutes what is costing you fluency, and it is usually not what you assumed.

Keep the file. Re-record the same two minutes at the end of the course, and the comparison will tell you more than any certificate. The method is in measuring your own progress.

2. Three emails you handled badly

Real threads, with names, figures and anything commercially sensitive removed. The ones worth bringing are not the ones with grammar mistakes — they are the ones where the grammar was fine and the effect was wrong.

The email that sounded curt when you meant efficient. The one that took four paragraphs to ask for a deadline extension because you could not find the polite short version. The one where you said yes when you meant "yes, but."

Register — the difference between direct and rude, between careful and evasive — is invisible in a textbook and obvious in your own outbox. Written work has its own dedicated territory; see business writing, emails and documents.

3. A document you have to produce regularly

The weekly report, the project update, the client summary. Whatever you write on a schedule.

The reason this matters more than a one-off document is repetition: a format you produce forty times a year is worth an hour of teaching in a way that an annual review is not. By the end of a short course you should have a template you built yourself, with your teacher's corrections baked in, that turns a ninety-minute writing task into a twenty-minute one.

4. The vocabulary of your industry — as a list you wrote

Not a glossary you downloaded. A list of the terms you actually use, including the ones you use in your own language and have never had to say in English.

Two columns work best: the term, and the sentence you would have to say to explain it if the English word would not come. That second column is where the real teaching happens, because circumlocution — describing your way around a word you have lost — is the single most useful survival skill in a meeting, and it can be practised deliberately. Vocabulary methods more generally are in memorisation methods for adults.

5. A slide deck, with the numbers taken out

If you present, bring one. Structure, not content: the way you open, the transitions between sections, the moment you hand over to questions.

Presentation English is heavily formulaic, which is good news — a relatively small set of phrases covers openings, signposting, handling interruptions and closing, and a teacher can drill them until they are automatic. The part worth spending real class time on is the question section at the end, because that is the unscripted part and the part people dread.

6. Two or three questions you could not answer

Think back to the last meeting where somebody asked you something and the English arrived thirty seconds after the moment had passed. Write down the question.

These become the raw material for the most uncomfortable and most useful exercise in a business course: answering a question you did not expect, on a topic you know well, in a language you are still assembling. Repeated across four weeks, this is the thing that transfers most directly back to work.

7. A one-sentence goal, written down

Not "improve my business English." Something a stranger could verify: *"Chair the Thursday call without preparing notes."* *"Write the client update in twenty minutes instead of ninety."* *"Get through a conference call without asking anyone to repeat themselves twice."*

The sentence has a job. It is what you hand your teacher in the first class so that the timetable gets built around it, and it is what you check against in week four. How to arrive at one is in study-abroad goal setting, and what to agree with your teacher on day one is in the first week with your teacher.

How to hand it over — and the confidentiality question

Give the whole set to your teacher in the first class, not drip-fed across the month. A teacher who sees all seven items at once can plan a four-week arc; a teacher who receives one document in week three has already built the course around something else.

On confidentiality: redact properly before you leave home rather than in the classroom. Remove client names, figures, internal system names, anything under an NDA. Replace them with placeholders — the language work is identical whether the client is called Meridian Group or Company A. If your employer has rules about taking work material abroad, check them before you pack; this is a five-minute conversation that is much better had in advance.

Preparation for calls and video meetings specifically has its own set of drills — see phone calls and video meetings — and the wider professional case is in business English for Clark professionals.

The short version

Bring a recording of yourself failing, three bad emails, a document you write every week, your own vocabulary list, a redacted deck, three questions you could not answer, and one verifiable goal. Hand them over on day one. An hour of one-on-one attention is worth a great deal, and it is worth exactly as much as what you put into it. More on studying effectively is in our study section, and choosing the right course in the first place is in how to choose a business English course.

In Clark, the eight CAESA member schools are government-accredited and enrol through partner agencies. If you want to describe your job and ask what a timetable would look like, the contact form is the place to do it.