Distance education has existed for decades; however, it has become prominent in the process of education digitalisation, and its popularity has dramatically risen over the last few years due to a rapid advancement in technologies. Moreover, a fast and demanding pace of life has evoked a demand for flexible forms of education, this way allowing learners to acquire various disciplines along with languages at the time and place convenient for them. The stated factors have led to the emergence of a wide range of distance learning programs offered by universities in different fields. The area of business is not an exception, and a variety of programmes have been designed by higher education institutions, where business English courses are their obligatory components. The importance of business English and its acquisition in today’s globalised world should not be underestimated and an increased necessity to perform work-related tasks in English implying proper application of language skills and field-specific terminology has become obvious. Furthermore, a proper use of field-specific lexis is considered to be an important component of specialist interaction. Consequently, designed business English distance learning courses should focus on the enhancement of both language skills and field-specific vocabulary, which learners will be able to apply for efficient performance within the business environment. Thus, sufficient attention and time should be allocated for this aspect of business English acquisition withing the digital dimension when the inclusion of this component of distance learning language courses offered by higher education institutions should serve as a starting point. Taking into account the previously stated, the goal of the current case study lies in ascertaining the efficiency of distance learning Moodle-based business English courses aimed at the enhancement of language skills, and specifically focusing on field-specific terminology acquisition. Prior to the design of the courses, a questionnaire was administered revealing students’ high demand particularly for business terminology acquisition, which served as an additional argument for the inclusion of multiple activities aimed at business-related terminology acquisition. To pursue the stated goal, a corpus containing learners’ spoken assignments has been compiled and analysed on the subject of the acquired busienss-related terminology application. The performed analysis has revealed that the designed Moodle-based courses and their included activities can contribute to the enhancement of business English learners’ vocabulary which, as a result, facilitates efficient interaction within professional business environment.

Keywords: Distance learning, business English, field-specific terminology, vocabulary acquisition, Moodle-based course.