How to teach English to IT professionals online

To teach English to IT professionals online, you need to practice the situations your student faces at work: stand-ups in English, explaining code, meetings with international clients and technical interviews. Developers already read documentation in English; what holds them back is speaking.

These students usually pay well and stay for a long time, as long as they feel the English lessons for tech are solving their problem. And their problem is concrete: speaking up on a call without freezing.

Why IT students are different

Tech professionals usually have "lopsided" English. Strong reading, a huge technical vocabulary, and speaking skills well below that.

They understand Stack Overflow, documentation and YouTube tutorials. But in the stand-up with the international team, they answer in short sentences and avoid going into detail about what they did.

Other common traits of this profile:

• Pronunciation of technical terms learned only by reading, and often wrong because of it.
• Fear of technical interviews in English, which decide salaries in dollars or euros.
• Tight schedules, with lessons squeezed into lunch breaks or after work.
• Little patience for textbook lessons that have nothing to do with their routine.

If your English lessons for developers don't target these pain points, the student feels they're wasting time.

How most teachers run these lessons today

The most common format is a video call on Google Meet or Zoom, built around a tech topic. The teacher simulates a stand-up, asks the student to explain a project or runs interview questions.

The conversation is good, but very little is used afterwards. It usually goes like this:

• The teacher jots down a few mistakes in a notepad while talking.
• Sends a summary over WhatsApp or email at the end of the day.
• Material ends up scattered across Drive, chat and notebooks.
• After two months, nobody can say how much more the student is speaking.

For an IT student, used to metrics, logs and history, this feels improvised. They want data, not impressions.

What a good English class for IT needs

Ideally, the live class is almost entirely speaking practice in real scenarios, and the correction comes later, without cutting off the student's reasoning in the middle of a technical explanation.

For that to work, you need a few things:

• Realistic simulations: stand-up, backlog refinement, architecture presentation, a conversation with a recruiter.
• A visual space in the class, so the student can draw the system flow while explaining it in English.
• A record of what was said, to go back to the exact sentence where they got stuck.
• Corrections with explanations, especially for pronunciation and sentence structure.
• Progress numbers: how much they spoke, how many different words they used, at what pace.

When technical English students see those numbers going up, they understand they're making progress, even in the weeks when they feel stuck.

How Noladi helps with these lessons

In Noladi, the class happens in a live classroom in the browser, with a collaborative whiteboard. You can ask the student to draw the project architecture on the whiteboard and explain it in English, just like in a meeting. You can also prepare the lesson in advance, so the whiteboard opens with the simulation script already loaded.

After the class, you and the student get the full lesson review: transcription synced with the video, AI correction suggestions for grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary, and speaking stats such as speaking time, words per minute and unique words. The student hears the correct pronunciation of the words they got wrong, which fixes that technical term they always said the wrong way.

Discover Noladi

If you want to teach English to IT professionals under your own brand and show student progress with data, check out Noladi at noladi.app/teacher. The account is free, and you can try the live classroom and the post-class review before deciding.