The project addresses the needs of supplies/sales personnel of small enterprises (SE) having or wishing to establish business contacts with foreign contractors/clients. Staff in charge of business communication in SEs do not usually have adequate skills in terms of practical knowledge of a foreign language or intercultural competence needed to establish and maintain business contacts. Very few of these firms can afford to employ professional import/export staff, in most cases these tasks are taken by personnel not properly trained. Language schools offer mostly general foreign language courses. Tailor-made courses for businesses are few, expensive and usually inaccessible to personnel of SEs: the courses organised at work place are usually run for larger enterprises. A busy schedule of work in SEs usually excludes their staff from participation in on-site courses at language schools, which require regular attendance over a long period of time. The business_mail project involving English teachers, communication skills trainers and e-learning experts develops appropriate measures to address the above situation through:- an e-learning platform for the delivery of business communication skills- a set of on-line modules- an on-line course in business English and intercultural communication (ICC) to employees of SEs- the evaluation of the efficiency of the training in different cultural and business contexts.The final product of the project is a validated on-line course in business English and ICC covering actual communication problems encountered in import/ export practice of SEs. The projects results will be exploited by each of the partners and widely disseminated in the lifelong learning community in Europe.
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