Developer English guide

English for Developers: How to Practice the English You Use at Work

Generic English courses teach you how to order coffee and describe your family. Here is what developers actually need, and how to practice it.

Why generic English courses do not work for developers

Most English courses are designed for tourists and students. They teach vocabulary for restaurants, airports, and small talk. But if you are a developer working in an international team, the English you need is completely different.

You need to explain a bug in the daily standup, push back on a design decision in a code review, describe a production incident to your manager, and write a pull request description that a senior engineer can review in seconds. No phrasebook teaches you that.

The 5 situations where developer English matters most

Daily standup

Three questions, 30 seconds each. You need to describe what you did yesterday, what you are doing today, and what is blocking you. The challenge is sounding natural and concise, not reading from a script.

Example

"I finished the authentication refactor and opened a PR for review. Today I am starting the password reset flow. No blockers."

Code review

Leaving a comment on someone's code requires precision and diplomacy. You need to explain what is wrong, why it matters, and suggest an alternative — without sounding dismissive or unclear.

Example

"This approach works, but it will break if the list is empty. Could we add a guard clause at the top?"

1:1 with your manager

This is where you advocate for yourself, ask for feedback, and discuss your growth. Many developers avoid these conversations because they do not know how to express opinions and concerns professionally in English.

Example

"I feel I am ready to take on more complex tickets. Is there a project where I could take more ownership?"

Incident response

When something breaks in production, you need to communicate clearly under pressure: what is happening, what the impact is, what you are doing to fix it, and what caused it once it is resolved.

Example

"We have a P1 incident. The payment service is returning 500s for all checkout requests. We are investigating the last deploy."

Technical documentation

README files, ADRs, pull request descriptions, and Confluence pages. Written English that is unclear costs your team hours of back-and-forth. Concise, precise writing is a senior engineering skill.

Example

"This PR adds a rate limiter to the forgot-password endpoint. Without it, an attacker can flood a target inbox with reset emails."

How context-based practice actually builds fluency

The reason most developers plateau with English is that they practice English in general, not developer English specifically. Vocabulary drills and grammar exercises train your brain for abstract language. They do not train you to think fast when your tech lead asks "can you walk me through your approach?" in the middle of a live code review.

The research on second-language acquisition is clear: fluency comes from repeated exposure to the same contexts, not from studying grammar rules. The more you practice the exact sentences, patterns, and vocabulary you will use in your actual work, the faster your brain learns to produce them automatically.

Where to start

Here are the Lingua-e resources that map directly to the 5 situations above:

Ready to practice your English at work?

Lingua-e has interactive exercises built around real developer conversations: standups, code reviews, retrospectives, and more. Practice until it comes naturally.

Try Lingua-e for free

Written by

Roxana Lafuente

Lingua-e's founder

Roxana Lafuente is a software engineer with 8+ years of experience. At the beginning of her career, even though she had already passed the First Certificate in English, she still froze every time she had to speak up in the daily standup. That was a gap nobody was fixing. After 2,000+ standups, she figured out what actually builds fluency: practice that looks like your real work. She built Lingua-e so other developers wouldn't have to take the long road to feel confident working in an international development environment.