Experiences with language schools?

Hi, I would be interested to hear what you have to say about private language schools. Have you ever taken any courses or classes to learn English? What did you think of the service? How much did your English improve during the course? How many students were in your group and how often did you take lessons? I’m asking all these questions because I’m working on a research project at university. This is the first stage of information gathering which will give me a general idea as what questions to ask and how to design my questionnaire.
Thank you in advance,
Andreana

I’d also be very interested in hearing responses. :slight_smile:

Andreana, I can see that you haven’t gotten many responses yet, so I can tell you an experience I had. My native language is English, so the language of the school was French, but maybe it will help you figure out which questions to ask.

Some years ago, I took a French class for false beginners at the Alliance fran?aise in my home city. The class was not too big, maybe only about 12 people. The lessons were twice a week for about three hours. The textbook was professionally produced by a major French publisher. The teacher was a real French teacher from Paris, not just some French person.

The only problem with the class was that the teacher seemed to be accustomed to teaching classes in Paris, where the students are in French immersion all day and probably have a full day of French drill every day. She tried to drill us to the same level of accuracy and fluency as her classes in France, but she didn’t seem to realize she couldn’t do it in the time we had. This meant that we hardly covered any of the material in the book, so we achieved a lot of accuracy in very, very little material, but we didn’t progress far and didn’t learn much. In other words, the teacher didn’t adapt herself to the new circumstances or to the needs of people learning French as a foreign language and not as a second language.

One thing I’d look at in your study would be what kinds of materials are used at the school. Some schools use generally available published textbooks, and others create their own materials. At some schools (like Berlitz), the materials are quite accurate, but some very expensive schools create materials that are full of mistakes. Also, was the English teacher a teacher, or just an English speaker?

Hi Jamie,

Thank you for sharing your experience. Could you please elaborate on the drilling your teacher tried to do with you? How exactly do language drill techniques work? Does drilling mean, the students listen to the teacher pronounce a sentence which the students then have to repeat? And why do you think the materials are important?

Best regards
Andreana

The drills the teacher used were basically audio-lingual drills. Let’s say I give you this model sentence:
He is bringing his car.
Then I call out a different subject, and you have to make all the necessary grammatical changes:
She
She is bringing her car.

They
They are bringing their car.
There were also other types of drills. These are very good, very effective drills, but the teacher insisted on perfect accuracy all the time in people who did not have daily exposure to French. So, she spent almost all the class trying to get people to say simple things perfectly every time, and the class never made any progress. With that type of class, she should have focused on good comprehension and communicative effectiveness with or without perfect grammar.

The materials are important because bad ones can implant the wrong words, the wrong spelling and the wrong pronunciation in one person or a whole nation. If you’re studying English, and you’re using materials from a good British or American publisher, you’re pretty safe. However, I have seen some of the materials from private language schools in Germany, and they are full of misspellings, wrong expressions, etc. Then I have to work extra hard to get the people from that country to say things correctly.

Some of these mistakes can be planted in the brains of entire nations. When Germans and Austrians first come here, I am sent into their companies to bring their English up to standard. Nearly all of them use the expression “in former times”, which you will hardly ever hear in English. When we hear it, we think of something very long ago, maybe at least 100 years ago. These people have been taught to use that expression for things that happened as recently as two years ago! When I moved to the Czech Republic, nearly the whole nation pronounced the word “sweater” as "sweeter’. When we corrected them, they claimed it was “British English”, but it’s not. They studied from Czech-produced ESL textbooks that were full of mistakes in grammar and vocabulary, and it was very hard for the Americans and the British to eradicate these errors from people’s heads once they had been lodged there.

Hi Jamie,

You have outlined the obvious problem with so called ‘ESL-materials’ very clearly: Those resources are produced for people who speak English as a second or foreign language. Now the question is why would anybody use such materials in the first place? Why create artificial materials that contain phrases which are never used in the real world? Why not use real, authentic materials? Why can a person wanting to learn English not use authentic resources that contain simple but accurate phrases? It often has struck me as odd that intelligent people would people purchase overpriced text books that contain artificial, dull and outdated dialogues, texts and useless exercises? What is your explanation for this situation?
Regards
Andreana

The problem is not one of using commercially produced ESL materials. It’s one of using poorly produced materials that are inaccurate.

Instructional language materials are extremely beneficial at various stages in the learning process, especially at the beginning. One reason is that they collect all the basic things you really do have to say and understand to be minimally proficient in the language. You would go crazy trying to find authentic materials that contained all the things a beginner needs to learn, and when you found them, about 90% of the text or speech would be too far above the student’s head.

Another reason you’re wasting time if you use only authentic materials is that authentic materials don’t explain things. When I get intermediate or advanced students who have used only authentic materials before – or books teaching by the communicative method – they still have very fundamental problems that explicitly taught students don’t have. For example, Mexican students might not even realize at the advanced level that you can’t make adjectives plural in English. They will write “these bigs dogs” or “the olders children” all the time. Students who had been taught through ESL materials seldom make these mistakes at this level.

Even at the very advanced level, you have to introduce teaching materials from time to time. I had a Korean student who had lived in the US for 30 years – who had been swimming in authentic materials for three decades – and he was still unaware of most English idioms. He missed half the meaning of what he heard and read. Only when he was specifically taught from an idiom exercise book did he start noticing them around him, and it brought his English to a new level. Before that, his mind had just passed over them. This was a very successful businessman, so he wasn’t a stupid guy with some kind of learning problem.

If you teach or learn with authentic materials only, you will wind up the way I am in some languages, which is that I can read classical novels, but I can’t order ice cream.

Jamie, if somebody says or writes things like “these bigs dogs” they just have invented their own structures which they have never seen before anywhere. Why would they do that? When you learn a second language you have to pay great attention to all the little details and you have to raise awareness of correct grammar patterns. For example, before you write something like “the olders children” you simply can google this phrase and you will see that what you have made up exists only in your mind and not in the real world.

I think it depends on what kind of materials you select at what stage in your learning process. If you realize that the materials you are using contain too many new phrases or idioms why not switch to something simpler? When you come across a new idiom and you don’t know its meaning (you should be able to have at least a rough idea though if the idiom occurs in particular context), you can always refer to a dictionary or even better to a forum like this.

He did that on purpose. He could have chosen other materials that would have been easier for him to understand. If you are a child you also start by reading texts containing concepts that you can grasp. Only then will you make progress.

Or he may not have wanted to pay enough attention to the level of the materials he was using.

He might not have been stupid, but he wasn’t capable of selecting the right materials for his learning situation. For example, he could have read Wikipedia articles in simplified English.

If you can read a classical novel in a second language it will take you just minutes to learn how to order ice cream in that language. For example, you could read a modern novel in which some of the characters order ice cream.

I don’t agree. This is interference from Spanish, and the student has just transferred a grammar rule from Spanish to English.

It also proves a point I make with people all the time: If you don’t explicitly teach the grammar of a language, the students will impose whatever grammar they have been explicitly taught. I have seen this, for example, when an American teacher has taught English through the communicative method, and her Czech students wind up speaking English with very accurate German grammar. Their German teacher had explicitly explained the grammar to them, and the English teacher hadn’t.

But most people cannot perceive all these tiny details, because their native language provides a set of subconscious presumptions that blind them. English, for example, has no instrumental case. In Russian, Czech or Polish, you have to use one of several suffixes to indicate that you are using X as a tool, or passing through X. If no materials had actually explained that to me, it would have taken me years, instead of 20 minutes, to figure that out. It just never occurs to many speakers of Spanish, Polish, etc., that languages don’t pluralize adjectives, so they never notice that about English.

Remember that on this site someone pointed out that on Google you can get more than 8 million sites that contain the nonexistent word “commerical”. A learner would take that as proof that it really does exist. Besides this, most people can’t carry their computer and Internet connection everywhere (yet).

For beginning learners, there’s a point where no authentic materials are easy enough. I have taught classes that can’t make any sense at all of The Easy English News. That’s when you need ESL materials.

The idea that people can guess correctly from context is a common myth in the language teaching world. Research now shows, in fact, that when learners try to guess words or expressions from context, they guess wrong more than 60% of the time. Only the most advanced learners get it right most of the time, but even they can mess up. Two Germans read the word “pervasive” recently, and when I asked if they knew the meaning, they said, “Yes, we have the same word in our language, it’s ‘perverse’.”

Also, working people, like this Korean man running his multi-million-dollar business, are busy and have only limited time to study English. They need everything packaged for them.

Absolutely not.

The problem was that there was no easier source of news and business information than The Detroit News, which is written at the level of a 13-year-old. He cannot go get children’s books about the stock market, taxes and the economy. He’d been reading for 30 years or more. He understood everything except the idioms. His mind had gotten used to getting the information he needed from the straightforward language, and semi-consciously passing over the idioms.

He wasn’t a student. He was busy. He’s got a business, and kids and no spare time.

There was no Wikipedia. And even now there are no Wikipedia articles on what is happening with the Michigan tax code today, or about the present state of the apparel industry.

Right, and read a hundred pages just to get to the ice cream scene. I can go to the bookseller and ask, “Do you have any modern novels in which the characters order ice cream?” I hope you were joking.

Hi Jamie,

I do admit there are different situations for different people and of course it’s good to consult a language specialist. Still, I’d like to point out the following. When you google the word commercal it is true that you will find millions of results. However, on the top of the first page right beneath the search box this question pops up in red:
[color=red]Did you mean: commercial

So, Google makes it easy for you to double-check any word. And I was not talking about words because you can run them through a spell checker. I was referring to phrases.

Anyway, let’s return to pattern drill methods. Have you ever heard of the Callan Method? What do you think of it?
Regards
Andreana

Hi Andreana, the initial topic of this dicussion the quality of language schools and Jamie (K) related his one his experiences. Then the conversation got a bit off base I guess and now we seem to be talking about how to learn a language. In my opinion it is useful to learn some the basic structures of a language. You should know such concepts like the parts of speech, comparatives of adjectives, verb forms, tenses, use of articles, etc. I mean regardless of the language you intend to learn, these basic concepts will help you in your learning. So when you look for the right language school make sure they cover these items in their programs.

It doesn’t tell you if it’s right or wrong. It only asks you if you meant something else. Frequently I use a correct term to search Google, and it asks me if I meant another correct term.

That feature can give you error feedback if there are only five hits for your misspelled search term, versus 3 billion for your correct one, but there’s always a chance that what you wrote in is also correct. It’s like spellchecking. If you can’t already spell, you go with the wrong suggestion.

I’ve never heard of it, but I’ve just looked at their website. They blather a lot about the method, but only give you tiny hints as to what it is. The hints tell me that it is a present-day variation on the Dartmouth-Rassias Method, which is a variation on the audiolingual method from the 1950s, which is a variation on Skinner’s behaviorist programming of pidgeons, which is a variation on Pavlov’s ringing the bell while putting meat powder under the dog’s nose. This sort of rapid-fire, behaviorist method of language teaching has proven to be quite effective, although no method works well completely in isolation. This and other methods burp back up every couple of decades or so with a different name.

Hi

Well I don’t know if I can talk about my own experience here but I went in a private school in Bournemouth for 4 weeks last summer and I keep an excellent memory! I don’t remember the name of the school but the organization I choose was Nacel and I really don’t have to complain. Indeed they were here to answers to all of my doubts, and they offer a good service. There, I stayed in a typical home family and I had my own bedroom. The classrooms were very well equipped and the teachers experienced and friendly. Maybe, the only negative point is that people who are 17 do not have the permission to go out the nights :cry: well they can but with an adult!!
I really improve my level in English (I’m French) and I still keep in touch with some friends I met there.
Here is the link for those who are looking for a very helpful linguistic stay in England.

[url]http://www.nacel.org/cdlp/Language-Schools/United-Kingdom/English-UKBOU.php[/url]

Bye! :stuck_out_tongue: