The series of English Corner

As a software company that is focusing on the outsourcing business mainly to USA and Europe, Jianfeng always pays a lot of attention to the foreign language capacity of the employees. In Jianfeng, English is our working language. Our engineers have to communicate with the clients in English, all emails, documents, daily and weekly reports are written in English too. But the employees still not satisfy with their English level, they appeal to improve their listening and speaking capacity in English. In response to this requirement, Jianfeng English Corner series came to birth.

On Oct. 13th, 2006, led by the administrative department, organized by the marketing department, the first English Corner was held successfully at noon, discussing the hottest topic in the international society during these days– North korea’s nuclear test. Despite that we work in IT industry, surprisingly, our employees appeared highly interested in this political event. Many employees sacrificed their siesta to join in this English Corner. The discussion was ardent and fruitful: everybody had their own opinion on this issue, but at the final, we also reached some points of consensus. One girl who attended in this discussion said after, “this activity is great! It not only improves my oral English and expression capacity, but also opens my eyes to international news!”

The great success of this very first time brought a huge encouragement and confidence to our organizers. As a consequence, we decided to hold English Corner periodically, to make it a series.

On Oct. 17th, 2006, the second English Corner was held, ahead of schedule. This time we turned to discuss a very practical theme– the transportation situation in Beijing: problems and solutions. Almost everyone of our working class suffers from the traffic jam in Beijing everyday at least 2 times in rush hours, so “what do you suffer” and “what do you think should be the solution to this problem” became the focus of this debate. Since this topic is not so serious as the political one, and it hits the painful point that happens to us everyday, each attendee talked much more this time.

After each discussion, we also put the record of it onto our inner website at once, for the employees who are interested in English Corner but missed it unexpectedly, to download and learn by themselves. In a word, the series of English Corner is productive and benefits our employees a lot. We will persist holding similar activities in the future.