Business English tutors, lessons & classes

Business English is the working language of cross-border commerce, and most of the people using it learned it as a second or third language. Roughly 1.5 billion people speak some English; the version that runs international finance, tech, law, consulting, and manufacturing is its own register, shaped by American casual-direct conventions and British indirect-formal ones, with hybrid forms across Singapore, Lagos, Mumbai, Dubai, and every multinational HQ in between. Students who arrive here are almost never beginners. They are fluent professionals whose English is good enough to live and work in it, and who keep hitting the same wall: the gap between technically correct English and the kind of English that actually belongs in the room.

The gap usually shows up in register. Fluent non-native speakers regularly use the right words at the wrong altitude, formal when the room is casual, casual when stakes are high, or carrying patterns from their first language that read as off in English without anyone being able to name why. American business English skews casual-but-direct: first names by default, contractions everywhere, short sentences, action verbs. British business English keeps more indirection in speech (I wonder if we might, perhaps we could) and more formality in writing, particularly in law and senior correspondence. Indian English business register is often more elaborate than American, with Latinate vocabulary that reads as overformal to US ears. None of these registers is wrong; the question is whether yours matches the one in the room.

Vocabulary is the next layer. There is the core business lexicon (revenue, margin, pipeline, deliverable, stakeholder, action item) and then there is the corporate-jargon layer that has metastasized over the last two decades: circle back, touch base, loop in, take it offline, bandwidth, deep dive, boil the ocean, move the needle, low-hanging fruit. Most learners over-formalize where Americans use idiom; many also under-use idiom in writing where American business actually expects warmth. On top of that sits industry-specific vocabulary that varies enormously between corporate finance, consulting, big-tech product management, and intellectual property law. Lessons build vocabulary from your real source documents (your decks, your contracts, your earnings transcripts, your industry's daily news) rather than from a generic Business English textbook.

Cultural codes are the layer fluent learners most often skip past. American business culture is meritocratic in self-presentation, expects junior people to speak up, treats small talk before a meeting as load-bearing, and reads silence in a discussion as either agreement or disengagement, neither of which is what you want. Pushing back on a senior leader's idea is normal and expected, but how you push back matters: I'd challenge that assumption works; I disagree alone reads as terse. British meetings run on more indirection, with disagreement coded into hedging phrases that Americans sometimes miss entirely (that's an interesting idea, said with the right pause, often means no). The relationship layer matters more than non-native speakers expect, and the rituals around it (the Friday beer, the LinkedIn rec, the genuine-sounding how was your weekend) are part of how trust gets built. Skipping them does not save time; it accumulates a cost you only feel later.

Delivery is the layer that gets least attention and matters most in high-stakes settings. Filler words (like, you know, basically, actually) appear in everyone's speech, but heavy filler in a presentation or board meeting reads as low-confidence in American business culture, even when the underlying argument is strong. Pace matters too: many fluent non-native speakers default to a slightly faster speech rate in English than feels natural to native listeners, which compounds with accent and produces a real comprehension cost. Pausing where Americans pause (between clauses, after a thesis sentence, before the answer to a hard question) is a learnable skill that lessons rehearse explicitly. Accent reduction is a separate question from delivery, and we treat it that way: most students do not need to lose their accent, they need to be understood and to sound confident. Our American accent specialty page covers the cases where targeted phonetic work is the right call.

A handful of specific habits trip up fluent professionals more often than anything else when they operate in American business English. The casual register matters more than people think; over-formal English in a US team setting reads as cold or robotic, and warming up is harder than warming down. Email closings carry weight: Best, is the safe middle, Thanks, is warmer but slightly junior, Best regards, is formal-distant, Cheers, is British or British-adjacent, All best, is warm-personal. The rhetorical how are you is not a question; the right answer is good, you? Acronyms compound, and asking for the expansion of an internal acronym is expected, not embarrassing. The American I want to push back on that is direct; the British I wonder whether we have fully considered the alternative is more so, in a meeting where everyone speaks the same code. Lessons drill these moves with role-play and rewrites of your real emails because they are invisible to native speakers and routinely tripped over by everyone else.

Between lessons, the Business English immersion stack is genuinely excellent. For daily reading, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, and Reuters cover the register and vocabulary your senior counterparts are reading. Pick one or two and read them every morning. Earnings call transcripts from companies in your sector give you the exact phrasing used in your industry, with the bonus that the Q&A sections rehearse the language of pushback, hedging, and walking back commitments. For podcasts, Marketplace (NPR), Planet Money, How I Built This, Pivot, Acquired, The Daily, and Hard Fork cover business and tech in a casual-professional register. American business books that build vocabulary breadth: Michael Lewis on finance, Patrick Lencioni on team dynamics, Jim Collins on management, Reed Hastings on culture at Netflix. For British register, BBC Radio 4 podcasts and The Economist long-reads. LinkedIn itself is a useful corpus: the prose register is professional-casual, the vocabulary is current, and reading posts in your field for ten minutes a day gives you the active idiom your peers actually use. For the certification track, our guide to English tests covers TOEFL, IELTS, Cambridge Business English (BEC), and the C1 Advanced options that HR departments sometimes require.

The Strommen Business English roster covers the registers our students actually need. American native teachers from the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, several with prior careers in corporate finance, law, consulting, marketing, or engineering before they came to teaching. ESL-business specialists with corporate-training backgrounds who have coached hundreds of executives through international roles. Tutors familiar with US tech register, City of London finance register, Singapore-based regional register, and the multinational-consulting register that has become its own thing. Each tutor's bio names where they teach from, their pre-teaching career when relevant, and which student profile they fit best, executive coaching, presentation prep, industry vocabulary deepening, certification, accent and delivery. Pricing reflects experience and specialization. For students whose work crosses both American and British registers, we can pair you with one tutor of each on alternating weeks. The English classes page covers the broader family of programs and ESL classes page covers the foundational track for students who want a structured curriculum below the executive-coaching level.

Lessons calibrate to your actual goal. Pre-conference prep for a keynote is a different curriculum from monthly maintenance for an executive whose entire team operates in English; both are different from BEC or IELTS preparation for an HR-required certification, and different again from accent and delivery work for a presenter whose argument is strong but whose pace is costing them the room. We do not 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. The fluency layer is already in place. The most common adjustments are register calibration (matching American casual-direct or British indirect-formal as the room requires), industry vocabulary deepening from your own source documents, real-time meeting and presentation rehearsal, and writing review on the emails and decks you are actually sending. For a head-start before lessons begin, our piece on Business English ROI sketches the career-side argument, and you can also browse the full tutor list to filter by location, price, and availability. Tell us the room you need to operate in. The curriculum follows from there.