Whatever your interest, you can learn how to talk about it in English at one of our member centres. And often you can study several very unusual courses at one school alone.
ETC International College is one English UK member centre that offers a wide variety of English courses which help people with their career or their interests - including motorsport, aromatherapy, finance and engineering.
David Jones, the school's principal, says they run so many of these courses that not all of them are on the website, but details are often mailed to agents. Quite a few of the courses are for very specialist interests, but the school makes sure they can run with only a small number of pupils.
"We do English for courses that are business-related, and English plus for interests like tennis, horse riding and aromatherapy," he said.
English plus aromatherapy began about a decade ago after an enquiry from a Japanese agent. The first course got such good feedback that ETC has run it with the same trainers since, often in response to demand from students. If ETC has a booking for the course, it will often contact agents to ask if any other students would be interested, but courses are carefully structured so they can run with a very small group, says Mr Jones.
ETC's other really unusual course - English for Motorsport - also came out of student demand. "We had a request from one of our existing students - we didn't know at the time he was a racing driver and we built something for him." says Mr Jones.
The student had come to the right place, because Mr Jones and his wife have a background in the industry. She has worked in PR and marketing for Takuma Sato, Formula 1 driver in the BAR Honda team, and Mr Jones runs Red Dragon Motorsport and is the business development manager for the Excite Dakar Rally team.
English for Motorsport courses include the skills a student would need to be a racing driver or work in the industry, including being able to do media interviews, learning vocabulary and phrases and following safety instructions.
Students also learn skills and vocabulary relating to the car itself, the principles of sponsorship and sports marketing, how to socialise with sponsors and even producing a basic press release. It is also possible to do a day on a racetrack, either at Thruxton or Silverstone. The courses attract small numbers of students but fairly regularly.
English UK members offer all sorts of courses, from English and mining or English + computer coding to English with a book club. You can even share sports facilities with the British Olympic team!
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