International language and communications training
International language and communications training
With conventional language teaching, you quickly become overloaded. You are so busy struggling to survive that you have no time to grasp the subtleties of your new foreign language. You can’t hear, you can’t remember, you’re quickly demoralised. You are trying to do too many things at once.
The diagram shows the six stages and programs our mind uses in every conversation. In our own language, we happily cope with all at once. In a new language we need to develop new input/output skills (Stages 1 and 6) to actually hear the sounds and train our voice to speak with conviction. We need to acquire new knowledge (Stages 2 and 5), a huge new code book of language structures, vocabulary and cultural awareness. Evaluation and choice, our core processing skills in the bottom two stages, need no change but once they stop having to struggle with the WHAT are free to concentrate more on HOW you want the conversation to proceed.
We focus on one stage at a time so you are not stressed out. With our FOCUS Approach, we invite you to use your eyes to train your ears. With a recording, a transcript and a translation, you can learn to hear, appreciate and re-produce not just the content, but the feelings and intentions of the native speaker’s performance. First, we invite you to tune in to the music of the language, by marking the pauses on the new language transcript. You will probably fall about laughing because you can’t do it, similarly, when you try to shadow the speaker, you will laugh again, because its like dealing with tongue twisters. However, your laughter will motivate you to keep trying! Gradually, you will start to shadow their performance in the same way as an actor or musician. You ‘live’ their words and their worlds before rushing into your own production.
Alongside, these aquisition activities, you will need to find ways to cope before you are competant. Cope with being a composer of language, before you are competant. For this, we suggest you decide what you want to say and ask a native speaker to translate for you, and to provide a written transcript and a recording. You can then use the three speaking stages to develop your competance as a performer.
Using this process for skills development, you will find yourself absorbing masses of sophisticated, useful language much faster than you could by following a step-by-step course book, doing ‘ fill the gap ‘ exercises or struggling to remember vocabulary without context via flash cards or word lists.
You will of course in parallel want to cope with the demands of interactions with others in your new language. We don't expect you to remember but help you create your personal quick retrieval database and a conversation book to anticipate and rehearse what you will need. You decide what you need to learn and when.
We give you a FOCUS catalogue showing how your new language works. It is organised so that you can quickly look up how to ask questions, agree, disagree, be enthusiastic, say no, indicate who, what, which, when, where, how much, how often and how likely. It includes all the sentence building words you need, and about 1000 high frequency descriptors; an overview of the verb system so that you can easily talk about the present, the past and the future, the factual and the hypothetical; a list of high frequency verbs, especially those (I want to, I have to, I’m going to, I can, I could, etc.) that you can combine with a standard form of less familiar verbs.
We give you multiple checklists to help you monitor your progress, and step-by-step FOCUS activities to help you enjoy extending your range and interacting with native speakers wherever you encounter them.
Our aim is for you to become addicted to communicating in your chosen language and culture, driven by ‘want power’, not will power.
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