Course aim

The aim of our teens courses is to help your child become a better communicator in English. We develop your child’s skills and language they need to speak and write in English clearly and meaningfully. These are skills that your child can transfer to give them a competitive edge in their studies in mainstream school and later in life to help gain access to crucial gateways of work and further studies.

Challenges for teenage learners of English

We recognise that to make real progress towards English proficiency, there are a number of challenges facing students in this age group. Communicating in a foreign language with the teacher and with peers requires confidence, ideas, language knowledge and skill, and, above all, the motivation and interest to use English. Our teachers plan lessons carefully to support students in all these areas.

Communicative tasks – a building block for our approach

The main building block our teachers use each lesson is a communicative task. This involves the students speaking or writing to produce a concrete outcome such as a short presentation, telling a story, making an audio recording, writing an email and so on. Each task also often reflects real world tasks and situations so that students can understand the purpose of what they are doing and are more motivated to complete the activity. Students might, for example, role-play a radio interview and record this using a microphone, or they might create a promotional leaflet for tourists describing sights in Seoul.

Developing positive group dynamics

To really develop their English, teenagers need to be cooperative and motivated enough to complete such tasks effectively. We also find here in Seoul that while many students are very well behaved, they are usually extremely shy and reticent when beginning a course. We bring our skills and experience to getting teenagers to the point where they are motivated and willing to complete core communicative tasks each lesson with the teacher and with each other. Firstly, our teachers build a positive group dynamic in each class. We agree fair rules the students and teacher will follow. We encourage the students to work together through group activities. We develop a positive atmosphere by using some short lighter-hearted activities, songs, music and video. We develop positive relationships between teacher and students and between the students themselves based on key values of respect and understanding. This development of group dynamics is particularly important in the early part of a course, but our teachers continue to build positive group rapport every lesson.

Building context and interest

We find teenage students have three key problems when attempting communicative tasks in English. They can have difficulty thinking of ideas to talk and write about, they usually lack active language to use in expressing these ideas, and they need to be motivated to both participate actively in the first place, and, when they to do, to use more complex language beyond simple words and phrases. To support students with these issues, the first half of a lesson is usually devoted to developing the situation for the later communicate task. This is often linked to a cross curricula subject that this age group finds interesting, for example, adventure holidays, discussing different fantasy films, finding out about the Black Death from the Middle Ages and so on. When building the context, our teachers use motivating activities including video clips, brainstorming and competitive activities that engage the students’ interest and start them generating ideas and language to use in the later task.

Real language development

Using the course book for long periods of time and traditional grammar analysis and presentation by the teacher can be very de-motivating for teenagers. At the same time, we have found that teenagers joining our courses, while they may have been taught a lot of vocabulary and grammar in the past, are not able to or not very effective at recalling and using this language in their speaking or writing. We want to develop the complexity and accuracy of their language so that their speaking and writing is clearer and more effective. We develop student’s grammar and vocabulary using short language focusing activities. These are carefully designed to be motivating for students but in such a way as to focus their attention on the form of language. These activities can be similar to games or puzzles and often involve a competitive element. Examples include racing to order cut-up words to make sentences, guessing missing words in sentences, racing to reconstruct a text from key words or picture prompts and so on.

As students’ awareness of appropriate language forms improves, they gradually begin to use these forms in their speaking and writing over a number of lessons. For example, many students in our teenager level 1 courses do not initially use past verb forms when writing stories but after repeated exposure to this language through motivating, language-focused activities like above, they begin to use past verbs in their writing. The reality of language learning is that this is a long and messy process. Real language progress means being able to use the language in speaking and writing effectively, and that requires the time, patience and skill we provide in helping your child develop the complexity and accuracy of language they need.

The final part of the lesson involves students completing the main communicative task. It is important students also get the chance to try using the language they are gradually learning about and this happens at the task stage. The task is carefully designed to ensure students have the support they need to speak and/or write as effectively as they can.

Assessment and communication of progress

We assess students’ progress through two of the writing tasks and one of the speaking tasks set each term. The class teacher uses the data from each assessment to complete a report about each student’s progress and this is given to each student in the last lesson of every term.

A summary of our approach

Each lesson will involve most of the above features and will usually have the following pattern. Sometimes, we  emphasise one layer more than another in a lesson depending on students needs and interests at the time.

• First layer: Building context, interest, ideas and vocabulary
• Middle layer: A short burst of motivating language-focusing activities which get students thinking more consciously about how the language works
• Last layer: The communicative task involving speaking and / or writing in English