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Program Methodology
In order to provide a complete immersion experience, instruction is given only in English with a focus on conversation. Instructors encourage active learning through the use of dialogs, modeling, pictures, gestures, paraphrasing, and repetition.
There are eight language levels, and the curriculum at each level is organized around real-life themes and situations. Practice is given in all four language learning skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The goal is for students to improve their fluency, pronunciation, grammatical accuracy, and sentence structure in every theme.
American culture is also an important part of the language program so students gain a greater ability to understand and appreciate native speakers.
In this program, participants will:
- Overcome their fear of speaking in a small group setting with a maximum of 17 participants per class.
- Gain a greater ability to understand native speakers of the target language.
- Improve their fluency, pronunciation, grammatical accuracy and sentence structure.
- Learn to communicate effectively in situations that they would encounter in the real world.
- Gain a greater understanding and appreciation of native speakers through the teaching of culture.
Program benefits include:
- Instructors who speak with a native-like fluency in English.
- Using the Communicative Approach to second-language instruction, classes are given exclusively in the target language with a de-emphasis on translation.
- Language is taught through the use of modeling, pictures, gestures, paraphrasing, repetition, and the negotiation of meaning, whereby activities are structured to account for different learning styles and preferences.
- Practice in all four skills is given, with an emphasis on speaking and understanding.
- The curriculum is organized around central themes and functions specific to authentic, real-life tasks, which makes learning meaningful to students, as grammar and vocabulary have a communicative objective, and are taught as tools to support the functions rather than isolated rules and lists.
