Business English tutors, lessons & classes

Business English is the working language of international commerce, finance, technology, and global supply chains. Roughly 1.5 billion people speak English with some level of fluency, most of them as a second or third language, and the version used in cross-border business is increasingly its own register, shaped by American and British conventions but adapted to multilingual professional contexts. Lessons in this specialty target executives, managers, attorneys, engineers, designers, and consultants who already speak fluent English and need to operate at native or near-native level in specific business contexts: negotiations, board meetings, conference presentations, contract review, written correspondence, performance reviews, and the social side of business that English-speaking cultures take seriously.

What "Business English" covers depends on what you actually need. For most fluent professionals, the curriculum splits into five buckets. First, written register: email conventions (salutations, closings, tone), professional document writing (reports, proposals, memos), and the specific phrasing that signals seniority and competence without sounding stiff. Second, meeting English: how to chair a meeting, how to push back diplomatically, how to redirect when conversations stray, how to handle dominant or quiet participants, how to summarize and assign action items. Third, presentation English: opening hooks, transition phrases, audience engagement, fielding Q&A, handling pushback in real time. Fourth, negotiation English: the language of positioning, hedging, walking back, closing, and reaching agreement. Fifth, industry-specific vocabulary: finance, legal, tech, marketing, healthcare, manufacturing, whichever your sector is, the specialty terminology gets built in.

The register layer is where the biggest gap often lives. Fluent non-native English speakers regularly use the right vocabulary but the wrong register. Sounding too formal in casual contexts, too casual in formal ones, or carrying register patterns from their first language that read as off in English. American business English tends toward casual-but-direct: first names by default, contractions in speech and most writing, short sentences, action-oriented. British business English skews more formal in writing ("I should be grateful if you would..." still appears in legal and senior contexts) and uses more indirection in speech ("I wonder if we might..." rather than "let's..."). Indian English business register has its own conventions, often more formal and elaborate than American. Chinese English business register tends toward formal indirectness shaped by hierarchy. Lessons calibrate the target register to where you actually need to operate, American tech, London finance, Singapore-based regional, multinational consulting. The right register varies by setting.

Vocabulary in Business English carries some specific layers. The core vocabulary is shared across English-speaking business, revenue, profit margin, stakeholder, quarterly, action item, deliverable, pipeline. Then there's the corporate-jargon layer that's grown enormously in the last two decades — synergy, leverage (as a verb), circle back, bandwidth (for time), deep dive, boil the ocean, moving the needle. Knowing this jargon (and when not to use it) matters because it's the everyday language of American corporate culture. Industry-specific vocabulary varies enormously: corporate finance uses one set of terms, M&A another, consulting another, tech yet another. Lessons should be built around the real source documents in your industry, analyst reports, earnings calls, contracts, project briefs from your actual work, rather than generic Business English textbooks. For broader English foundations our 1,000 most common English words list is a useful supplement.

The cultural codes shape Business English as much as the vocabulary. American business culture is typically direct, action-oriented, casual in tone, fast in pace, and meritocratic in self-presentation. People speak up in meetings, push back on senior leaders' ideas if they disagree, and don't expect to be deferred to based on age or title. British business culture is more indirect, polite, and hierarchical, direct disagreement in a meeting is unusual; the polite "I wonder if we might consider..." is doing real work. Cross-Atlantic, cultural mistakes are common in both directions: Americans coming across as pushy in British meetings, Brits coming across as indecisive to Americans. Lessons address these dynamics directly, especially for executives working across multiple English-speaking contexts. Our blog post on American vs British business culture sketches the broader landscape.

A few specific things fluent non-native speakers tend to underestimate. The casual register matters more in American business than people think. Overly-formal English in an American team setting reads as cold or robotic. Small talk before meetings is real and load-bearing; skipping it (jumping straight to business) signals that you don't understand the relationship layer. Email closings matter: "Best," "Best regards," "Thanks," "Cheers", each signals something specific. Acronyms compound; American business is full of internal acronyms that nobody bothers to explain, and asking for clarification early is expected and not embarrassing. The American "how are you?" is rhetorical 90% of the time; the right answer is "good, you?" and not actually how you're doing. Lessons handle these specifically because they're invisible to native speakers and routinely tripped over by fluent learners.

Between lessons, Business English immersion options are excellent. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Reuters. Pick one or two and read them daily. Earnings call transcripts from companies in your industry give you the exact register and vocabulary used in your sector. Podcasts: Marketplace (NPR daily business), Planet Money, How I Built This, Pivot, The Daily, Hidden Brain. American business books that build vocabulary: Michael Lewis (anything), Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Jim Collins' Good to Great. For British register, listen to BBC Radio 4 podcasts and read The Economist. LinkedIn posts in English are also a useful corpus, the register is professional-casual, the vocabulary current. The pattern is the same as for any specialty: pick the daily content your senior counterparts read, and read the same.

The Strommen Business English roster includes native English teachers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, plus longtime ESL-business specialists with corporate-training backgrounds. Several of our Business English tutors come from professional backgrounds in their previous careers: corporate finance, law, consulting, marketing, and bring direct field experience alongside teaching credentials. Each tutor's bio says their teaching background, their pre-teaching career (where relevant), and which student profile they fit best (executive coaching, presentation prep, industry-specific vocabulary, certification prep). Pricing reflects experience. You can match yourself to a London-based finance teacher for City of London register, a US-based tech teacher for Silicon Valley business English, or a UK-trained ESL specialist who's prepped hundreds of executives for international roles. For other English programs, our conversational English, American accent, and ESL classes specialty pages cover related needs.

Lessons calibrate to your actual goal. Pre-presentation prep for a major conference is a different curriculum from monthly conversational maintenance for an executive whose team operates entirely in English, which is different again from certification preparation (TOEIC, IELTS, Cambridge Business English) for proof of proficiency. We don't run a generic Business English course. Each lesson is one-on-one, your tutor plans it around your week and your industry, and the trial is free. Existing English is a head start. The most common adjustments for fluent professionals are register calibration (matching the casual-but-direct American mode or formal-British mode as needed), industry vocabulary deepening, presentation and meeting practice in real time, and writing review on your actual emails and documents. For a head-start before lessons begin, our English course page shows the family of related programs. Or just browse the full tutor list and book a trial. Pick a tutor with experience in your industry. Put in the hours. The fluency layer is already there; this is calibration work.