Language schools where you start any Monday

[whatiftheblog]

I have done several two week Italian language schools. In my experience they start every other Monday. On the first day they give you a placement test for beginner, intermediate or advanced. They also are full on immersion. There is no English (or other languages) spoken during class. Most of the ones I've been to have daily handouts rather than books which include grammar, exercises and articles to read (depending on the class level). The class also includes a lot of conversation. I think they work because the classes are usually small (max of 12 students at most schools) and it focuses on conversation rather than being overly structured. They aren't actual courses though. You can take as many weeks as you'd like.

This is how it worked at my school in France. I was probably a B1-B2 at that point and tested into the second-highest level they had, but it was all a rolling curriculum, so you basically just join a group.

I wouldn't call this setup "fuzzy", though, especially at the B1-B2 level - in my experience, it was perfect for me and my level/needs. I didn't need new grammar concepts introduced to me, I needed to learn how to use what I already knew. My French improved leaps and bounds.

In the beginner classes, they took the group through a series of day-to-day situations, teaching speaking/reading/writing/grammar/pronunciation along the way. This closely mimics how children learn languages, as far as I understand - there's no set curriculum when you're a toddler, you just sort of learn new things as they happen in your environment.

[smallwhite]

OK, I think I've got it. Beginner fixed-syllabus classes probably last only a few weeks, when the syllabus progresses rigidly from one week to the next, and then students start to take "fuzzy" or flexible classes thereafter, where the prerequisites aren't so rigid. Something like:

Week 1: Lesson 1 Pronunciation
Week 2: Lesson 2 Nouns and articles
Week 3: Lesson 3 Adjectives
Week 4: Lesson 4 Numbers
Week 5-6: At the airport <-- and you start to get classmates from other weeks
Week 7-8: Eating out
...

That's feasible and possible.

[Cavesa]

You get classmates even the second or the third week. And the beginners certainly didn't spend week on pronunciation, it was not good.

I think one of the aspects we haven't mentioned is pretty important: You need to keep your customers happy, so that they'll pay for more weeks. If you allow them to fail, many will simply quit and ask for refund, instead of understanding their problem. If you spend a week on pronunciation, they won't feel like progressing, and you risk losing them too.

And in these courses, such a systematic, grammar based approach you describe is quite rare as most classroom aimed courses focus on conversation situations above all, no matter how many problems it brings. Like making French beginners start with a phrase containing a reflexive verb with "weird" spelling, so that they believe French is just memorisation of illogical chaos immediately.

It's great to see the copies based approach works for some learners well, like Lingua proves. But I still wouldn't drag toddlers into all this. Toddlers don't have a prescribed curriculum, but by the time they learn to speak, they have already covered the stuff passively many times, and there are so many other differences. We cannot learn like toddlers and we shouldn't want to. I don't know where this "adult way of learning is wrong" myth comes from. Toddlers aren't that efficient actually, despite their brain plasticity and saving the language to the L1 area. They simply have the best support, the most time, and the strongest motivation possible.

The copies based approach is very common in French classes, more than in Spanish or German ones, as far as I know. Partially because the classroom aimed French courses tend to be more crap than the other ones. And while the theory of the teacher taking the very best and fitting the learning to the group sounds great, the reality usually includes lots of running in circles, lots of chaos, students unsure what to study and how, and not much progress. Sure, it is a matter of preference. And of course any coursebook can be supplemented, I am the last one to stand against that. But I simply have too much experience with teachers who would have done the best, had they stuck to the book and pushed students to progress instead of giving more and more copies of the same stuff. It is the classroom equivalent of a self-teaching learner, who buys ten basic courses and spread themselves too thin trying to complete them all

[Systematiker]

Don't underestimate the size of these schools either. When I worked for one of the "method" schools, I was one of around 40 English teachers, each giving an average of 20 hours of instruction weekly - and it wasn't the largest area school, nor were the other twenty-something large competitors much smaller.

[arthaey]

I've attended 3 "start any week" language schools in Mexico. My level was already intermediate, and I was only looking for conversation practice with someone who was paid to patiently point out some (but not all) mistakes I was making. With those goals, the cheap informal schools were definitely the way to go for me.

They were the opposite of rigorous. The comment above about these schools focusing on conversation to the detriment of solid grammar study is spot-on. But again, it fit my needs. My class size was 1-5 students, all intermediate or better, so it was a good chunk of practice.