How do they teach then? Are they teaching students who already have some English knowledge? Your friends are helping them improve, instead of teaching from scratch? Its understandable if thats the case.
IIRC, they've said that they're targeting people learning english more than english speakers learning other languages. They have english courses in lots of languages.
Which is fine. It is about being understood. You are never going to get fluent from a course. Language changes, and even native speakers are learning new things.
Not if the students' plan is only to remain competitive with native English speakers. Knowing how to speak English as a second language, for pragmatic reasons, isn't the same as being an English-speaker in the sense of the parent post.
Or would they? At the end of my tenure, I decided to change tracks. Luckily I was given free reign at my school. Instead of teaching English, per se, I taught my students how to learn English on their own. For a 50 minute class I kept my instruction time down to 5 minutes (which was hellishly difficult, I can tell you). The rest of the class was a series of explorations in things like, "If I don't know, how can I find out?", "How do I read a book to get information out of it?", "How do a read a book for pleasure?", "How do I watch TV and understand what's going on?", "How can I improve my pronunciation without paying someone to train me?", etc, etc.
This is really interesting to me. I haven't been an ESL teacher before, but I am trying my hand at being one unofficially one for someone close to me who is trying to reach fluency, but has plateaued at an upper intermediate level. These are all things I am trying to encourage myself, but I have no real idea how.
Is there anything out there on the internet about this, or do you have any pointers?
Most of the times they have some prior background in the language. But often you teach to very young kids as well, in that case you are usually paired with a local teaching assistant.
The idea is that one peer "teaches" the other the language. It's a learning experience. And what we saw it's that the language it's not an barrier at the moment :)
For languages close enough to english, the methods of teaching are reasonably organic, as well. I don't remember learning this, discovering it later in preparations for TOEFL. I Can't speak for all, however.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. Teaching a language to students with mixed levels of previous knowledge and motivation is extremely hard. The schools I went to could never manage it.
I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.
I did it a few times for exchange students who struggled with English. I made sure they understood the concepts and could explain them to me in Arabic. It was a mix of editing, translation, and tutoring.
English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago...
That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO.
Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil, so it's really soon.
The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn pronuntiation properly. And that's the weakest link in our system. Most teachers have no idea how English is really pronounced and wouldn't be able to understand a native speaker to save their lives. It's impossible to learn English from someone that can't understand or speak it.
I believe it was Aguirre that proposed a plan to invite thousands of native speakers to teach English in Madrid. Of course everybody attacked her as usual whatever she says... I don't like her either, but that was a good idea for once.
Typically because the school they go to is in the local language, and they're motivated to make friends with kids who speak the local language. Often international business is done in English, so there's less incentive to learn.
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