Institute Authorised TESOL

Foreign language experience Nowadays, a lot of language schools offer packages where they guarantee you a certain language level of your choice in a very short amount of time and if you don’t reach it you’ll get your money back. I speak four languages, I’ve lived and worked in four different countries and I’ve been travelling all over the world. Learning a new language always depends on yourself, on your own motivation and on how often you expose yourself to the language. There is, and there never will be, a course, where you can just sit down and miraculously speak antoher language at the end, without putting any effort into it. But even if you do, a language course alone will never be enough to reach a high language level. If you really want to improve your language skills, the language has to be a part of your life at some point and it needs continuous practice. This is especially true for the higher levels, where improvement means vocabulary extension, using correct expressions and language refinement. You’ll learn english three times faster when you live in an english speaking country and need the language on a daily basis, that is, when you really need it to communicate. For every language counts, if you don’t use it you’ll lose it. The language learning process can be best compared to the learning process of how to play an instrument. At a certain point in their life, a lot of people start playing an instrument. The first time period, they make a lot of progress, they can see how fast they improve and this keeps the motivation up. But at a certain point the improvement gets slower and more difficult and the time they have to spend practicing increases. That’s where most of the instruments end up in some storage room, even if their teacher tells them that it will get easier again after a certain amount of time. I myself tried it with three different instruments, they all ended up in the attic. Exactly the same thing happens in the language learning process. There is a boost of confidence and a fast improvement at the low levels (from A1-B1), followed by a period of hard work and continuous practice (from B1-C1) and finally it gets easier again because the most difficult part is over and you already dedicated a high amount of time and exposed yourself continuously to the language (C2). Personally, I had all my language breakthroughs when I decided to live for a certain amount of time in an english, spanish or italian speaking country. Although I don’t want to say that it is absolutely necessary to live in another country to improve your language skills, I think it is defenitely a huge advantage. If you don’t have the possibility to live abroad, you have to find other ways to expose yourself to the language. This is a lot easier with english than with other languages because, at least in Europe, you can find english books, movies and TV programmes everywhere. When it comes to the improvement of the speaking skills though, english may be disadvantaged because of its common usage. english is a world language, used in international organizations and diplomatic relations but also in science and economy. It has a high amount of second language speakers and therefore became a lingua franca (working language), a language used between people that don’t share the same mother tongue. But this leads to a simplified and not entirely correct usage of the language, the main goal is to make yourself understood. If you use english on a daily basis with people who have only a basic konwledge of english, it may even reinforce your mistakes as they won’t correct you or may even make the same mistakes themselves. Once the mistake is enrooted, it is a lot harder to correct it. As this is a specific problem for english, you should be aware of it when teaching it.