Engineering students in North American universities often participate in cooperative education placements in workplaces as part of the requirements for their degrees and professional certification. Students for whom English is an L2 often experience difficulties in these placements due to the fact that while their academic language ability may be sufficient to manage their coursework, they struggle to cope with the communication demands of a workplace context. This paper is a report of a course designed to assist these types of students in augmenting their workplace communication abilities. Students were required to analyse the fluency features and formulaic language of native speaker (NS) models of speech in genres relevant to the professional workplace and to conduct ethnographic research and analysis with NSs in face-to-face communication on similar themes. Results of the course show that fluency and proficiency in general were improved for the majority of the students.