Basic Course : Where does the teacher start?

Hello friends,
I teach English at a girls' college which attracts students from a less-privileged economic and educational background. Over the last few years, thousands of job opportunities have opened up in my country, India, for those who have an undergraduate degree and can communicate reasonably well in English. Most of these are call-centre jobs that require a certain level of proficiency in spoken English.
To help my students land such jobs, which are fairly lucrative to get them started, I'm planning to design an eight-week course (as part of my work) in communicative English. I want suggestions from fellow-teachers on how to structure it. The trickiest part for me is to decide on where to start--these kids can't speak 2 full sentences without slipping up.
I look forward to some useful tips.

Syntactix

Sounds like an ESP course, English for Specific Purposes. There are articles online that may be of help to you, but not much on Call Center English, so you'll have to develop your own core areas for the course, which should be easy to do as long as you know the kinds of situations and language your students will need to be able to function effectively in their job. Find out what the students need to know. That's your first step, and it's the most important step because the syllabus will write itself.

When I was asked to design an ESP course for Chinese teachers of English, the first thing I did was look up the acronym ESP :lol: and search what other teachers were doing or had done. Then I did a needs assessment: I asked my students, the teachers, about their job, their duties, the problems they faced, and what "they" wanted to know and learn:

Speaking; e.g., classroom management language, communicating with parents and colleagues;
Listening; e.g., strategies in aural testing;
Writing; e.g., lesson plans, language used in student assessments and evaluations.
Reading; e.g., interpreting language used in course textbooks; aural reading: intonation and stress.

ESP is specific in its focus; you don't teach the whole language, nor do you teach core skills. You meet the students' specfic needs.

Here are a few articles:

Teaching English for Specific Purposes

English Program for Indian Call Centers

English for specific purposes teacher: Job*description*and*activities

English for Specific Purposes: What does it mean

Thanks a million.
Let me see how it goes.
These are undergrad girls who have no clue as to what they want to learn and are happy to leave it to me, as long as I can get them to converse in English. I hope it works--my magic wand, that is.
Many thanks, once again, for the links.