Pedagogical Foundations of a Short Term Intensive Online Course for Businessmen on Development of Negotiating Skills in English

English language has conquered the world as the instrument to communicate ideas across different cultures and contexts, every day it is used by innumerable people to do business. To succeed in business communication and negotiations businessmen have to possess negotiating skills or be able to acquire or develop them very quickly. The lack of ready-made resources for the purpose requires tailoring an intensive online course to meet the needs of adult learners. The paper explains how to integrate well-known principles of intensive language learning and effective English teaching approaches (lexical, concept-based, and communicative) into a short term 20h length online course helping businessmen to develop their negotiating skills, justifies the choice of digital tools and online platforms for the course design, and describes the results of implementation of the course in teaching several groups of business people. The subjects of the first experimental group participated in pre- and end- course surveys and the final oral test and showed quite high total score in the final oral test (4.45 vs 3.65 of the control group); speech fluency growth by 7.6%; and remarkable growth in confidence in business negotiations in English according to the learners’ self-esteem. The learners in all groups achieved the set goals and were satisfied with the course. The designed intensive course seems to be quite effective in terms of development of students’ fluency, confidence, and understanding the nature of a dialog communication. Further research steps are outlined.