ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ‘workplace’ to encompass both employees at work and students at university where they are preparing for workplace scenarios. Even the workplaces themselves are undergoing momentous internal change where traditional hierarchies at work are giving way to flatter work structures and matrix reporting lines. Team work and collaborative practices, as a result, have become highly valued in many workplaces. The language used for workplace emails, and communicative exchange in general, is governed by a ‘system of choices’ dependent on the context, purpose and audience, which need to be clearly contextualised, specified and modelled in any set of workplace training materials. As English has grown as the preferred language of business, commercial publishers and testing agencies have been prolific in developing products for adequate international market. There is an important distinction between language proficiency and communication performance as it relates to the pedagogy and design, delivery and evaluation of workplace English courses.
