Tech Vocabulary Foundations
Learn the essential nouns and verbs used in software teams and product meetings.
Quick answer
Tech Vocabulary Foundations is a free A2 business English course for software teams and IT professionals. It uses 6 practical lessons to help learners name common roles, tools, and workflows.
Why this course matters
Tech Vocabulary Foundations is built for the moments where a tech professional needs precise English under real workplace pressure: standups, product reviews, async updates, interviews, demos, customer calls, internal debates, and executive summaries.
Every lesson connects language to a concrete work situation. You will see how a short Slack message differs from a formal email and how technical vocabulary needs different levels of detail for each audience.
How to use the lessons
Start with the first lesson if the topic is new, or choose the work situation you need this week. Read the examples aloud, rewrite them for your role, then bring the phrase into Alex for practice.
Use the course as a reference before a meeting, pitch, sprint review, or interview. Open the matching lesson and select three phrases for the live situation.
What you should be able to say
By the end of the course, you should be able to explain the topic with the verbs, concepts, and amount of detail your colleague needs to act.
The practical test is simple: can you describe a problem, ask for help, propose a next step, and confirm ownership without making the listener guess? If the answer is yes, the English is doing its job. If not, use the lesson examples to tighten the subject, verb, object, deadline, and audience.
What you will learn
- Name common roles, tools, and workflows
- Understand sprint and backlog terminology
- Ask clarifying questions in standups
Roles & Responsibilities: Who does what?
10 min
The Sprint Lifecycle: From Backlog to Demo
10 min
Tooling Talk: Jira, GitHub, and Slack
10 min
Bug Reports: Describing Issues Accurately
10 min
Feature Requests: The Language of "Nice-to-Have"
10 min
Deployment & Release: Going Live
10 min
Practice plan for this course
1. Notice the register
Identify whether the example sounds casual, professional, executive, or technical. Then ask what changed: verb choice, sentence length, directness, or level of detail.
2. Rewrite for your context
Replace the sample company, project, and audience with your own. This turns generic business English into phrases you can use at work.
3. Rehearse with Alex
Bring your rewritten version to the AI coach and ask for corrections, register options, and a sharper version for your audience.
Workplace practice prompts
Use the first prompt before a live work moment: write a three-sentence update about something you are building, fixing, learning, or deciding. Sentence one gives context, sentence two names the current blocker or decision, and sentence three asks for the next action.
Use the second prompt after a lesson: take one vocabulary term from the course and use it in three registers. Write a casual teammate version, a professional stakeholder version, and an executive summary version.
Use the third prompt with Alex: paste a message you might send and ask for a clearer version. Then ask Alex to explain each change.
A useful weekly rhythm is one lesson, one rewritten work message, and one spoken rehearsal. Measure progress by whether another person can understand and act on your next update, request, or explanation.
If you are learning with a team, rewrite the same update for engineering, sales, customer success, leadership, or investors. Compare the versions and identify the wording each audience needs.
Course questions
Tech Vocabulary Foundations FAQ
What will I learn in the Tech Vocabulary Foundations course?
You will name common roles, tools, and workflows, understand sprint and backlog terminology, ask clarifying questions in standups. The examples are built around real technology and international-work situations.
Is the Tech Vocabulary Foundations course free?
Yes. All 6 lessons in this A2 course are publicly available for self-paced study and practice.
Who is this Tech Vocabulary Foundations course for?
It is designed for software teams, IT professionals, remote professionals who need clearer English for international technology work.
How should I practice tech vocabulary foundations?
Complete one lesson, rewrite its examples for a current work situation, say the result aloud, and rehearse it in the voice practice lab or with the AI coach.
Tech vocabulary that changes how people hear you
This course is not a glossary. It trains the words that let you participate in a software conversation without slowing the team down. A developer, product manager, founder, customer success lead, and investor may use the same term, but they listen for different details. Your job is to choose the right amount of technical depth for the person in front of you.
The first lesson separates roles and responsibilities because global tech teams move fast when ownership is clear. You learn the difference between "I am responsible for the API," "I am supporting the migration," and "I am blocked by the vendor review." Those sentences prevent confusion because they name the work, the role, and the dependency.
Sprint vocabulary gives you the language of delivery: backlog, grooming, scope, acceptance criteria, demo, retrospective, blocker, and release. These words matter because they turn messy progress into a shared system. Instead of saying "we are working on it," you can say "the ticket is scoped, the API work is in review, and the release is at risk because QA found a regression."
Tooling language helps you sound credible in day-to-day work. Jira, GitHub, Slack, pull requests, branches, comments, threads, mentions, and status updates all carry social meaning. A clear GitHub comment saves review time. A clear Slack thread keeps context in one place. A clear Jira note tells the next person what happened and what remains open.
Bug-report language is one of the highest-value parts of this course. Engineers do not need "it is broken." They need steps to reproduce, expected behavior, actual behavior, environment, severity, and whether the issue worked before. When you learn that structure, you become easier to work with across accents, time zones, and functions.
Feature-request language teaches you to separate customer pain from product demand. "Nice to have" does not mean useless. It means the team needs evidence: which user, what workflow, how often, what revenue or retention risk, and what trade-off the team would accept. Good English helps you request a feature without sounding like you are adding random scope.
Deployment vocabulary gives you the language of going live: staging, production, rollout, rollback, release notes, migration, monitoring, incident, hotfix, and postmortem. These words help you communicate calmly when pressure rises. A clear release update tells people what changed, who owns the next check, and what signal would trigger a rollback.
Continue your business English practice
- AI business English coach
Type for a written rewrite, or press the mic to speak with Alex. Speech gets a spoken reply.
- Voice and pronunciation practice
Listen and repeat workplace phrases for meetings, calls, feedback, and job interviews.
- Daily standup English phrases
Practice the three-sentence update: done, next, blocked.
- Founder story case studies
Study how real founders explain decisions, defend trade-offs, and pitch in business English.
Keep the language fresh between practice sessions: join this week's Meeting House agenda, a guided live practice every Thursday in Bogotá.
See this week's Meeting House agendaCourse reviews
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