Have you ever traveled to the country you dreamed of visiting? Perhaps you have spent years trying to learn the language of that country only to find that you still can’t be understood by those who live there!
Or maybe you communicate with international work colleagues , and they often ask you to repeat yourself over and over again!
It is frustrating to find that all your efforts to learn the language are causing a great deal of misunderstandings!
This is where having a native speaker of the language can really enhance your linguist abilities!
WHY IS THAT?
A native speaker of the language has spent their entire lives speaking , reading, writing and listening to each subtlety of the language you desire to know.
In your own native language, you just know what sounds right and wrong when speaking. A native language teacher will hear immediately where you are struggling , whether it be grammar or pronunciation, and will offer the corrections quickly and accurately.
You as a student acquire listening skills that help you connect the right tone to expressions, idioms and the phonetic placement in individual words.
One great advantage of learning with a native speaker is that they often do not know your native language and it encourages you to make use of all the vocabulary and grammar that you may already know.
Speaking skills are quickly advanced when you learn with native speaking teachers and this is the one skill that students find most challenging – having the confidence to speak the language they have been learning!
Why not book a trial lesson with us? Experience how if feels to put your skills into practice with native English Teachers!
Photo by Julia M Cameron from Pexels
How do we help our students to improve? After carefully assessing the 4 skills in speaking, reading, writing, and listening, we develop informative and engaging lessons tailored to your specific needs.
Lessons are systematically planned with progressive, key grammar structures introduced throughout the courseware. The grammar components are based on several curriculum we use. We develop lessons that focus on how to use the correct language more confidently.
We take into consideration the themes and topics that personally interest our students. We build the grammar exercises into the courseware in an interesting and engaging way.
The encouragement to speak and form simple phrases from the beginning is a key part of all the lesson plans. Getting to use the language to communicate is our aim for you!
Systematic Learning Courseware & Resources we use
Reach Higher – National Geographic Learning – YOUNG LEARNERS
This curriculum develops students’ language progress from beginners to advanced.
It includes all the grammar structures needed to grasp the language based on a wide variety of stories and activities designed to broaden general interest and science knowledge.
Part of the collection of National Geographic Learning program includes the option to focus on strengthening students’ ability to write accurately and creatively.
Oxford Discover Program – YOUNG LEARNERS
From the beginning this program introduces young students to common patterns of speech and focuses on the correct use of grammar.
Face to Face Cambridge University Press – Teen to Adult Learners
Transitioning from each level is exciting. This resource helps students confidently use their knowledge. It focuses on all 4 key language components and allows students to strengthen grammar skills through speaking and written exercises.
Lesson Development
Students own resources can be integrated into their individual programs. Exam practice and reviews are also an option if requested.
Progress in language comes from having the opportunity to use it regularly. All the teachers at English on Point pay close attention to the personal challenges our students have with the language. We also listen carefully to their ideas, and incorporate all of these into their tailored lesson plans
When you can use what you learn, you begin to see the advancement in your language skills.
One of the first steps to learning a language is figuring out where one word ends and the next one begins.
Certain syllables are likely to follow each other within individual words, but unlikely to follow each other between words. Take the phrase “between words.” In English, within a single word we’re much more likely to hear bet followed by ween than ween followed by wor.
Researchers have found that if you make up nonsense words like gimysi and mimosi and play a constant stream of these words to listeners, the listeners will eventually figure out the boundaries of the words based solely on the statistical properties of the words.
But still, it can take a long time to pick up the word boundaries. A team led by Daniele Schön invented just six words: gimysi, mimosi, pogysi, pymiso, sipygy, and sysipi, and after seven minutes of listening to these words repeated in random order, student volunteers couldn’t distinguish between them. It took over 20 minutes for listeners to learn where one word started and the next one ended.
Schön’s team suspected that singing the words might improve listeners’ ability to parse them. After all, mothers often sing to their infants. Perhaps one purpose of singing is to help children learn language faster. In a second experiment, the researchers assigned a unique pitch to each of the syllables used in their six words (gi was C5, my was D5, and sy was F5, and so on). A speech synthesizer played back the words in a sing-song fashion, with a musical note assigned to each syllable.
After listening to the words for seven minutes, the volunteers were tested. They heard three-syllable “words” from the original list and partial words composed of fragments of real words (for example, mysimi, made from gimysi and mimosi)....
In the speech-only experiment, listeners did no better than chance. But in the second experiment, nearly everyone did better than chance, and the average score was 64 percent correct — significantly better than chance performance. Simply associating each syllable with a musical note improved performance.
But in real songs, syllables aren’t always matched with the same notes. Sometimes different syllables get the same note, and sometimes the same syllable is sung with a different note. In a third experiment, Schön’s team allowed the notes to vary with each syllable. Again, listeners could identify words at a rate better than chance (though they weren’t as good as in the second experiment).
Schön and her colleagues don’t go so far as to argue that music is a requirement for learning language, but they do make the case that the extra information provided in music can facilitate language learning. They also suggest that other information, like gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language.
But there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Language and music are both associated with emotions. And of course, we know that children — especially small children — really like music. This study offers another bit of evidence that the link between language and music may be a fundamental one.
D Schon, I Peretz, M Besson, M Boyer, R Kolinsky, S Moreno (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition Cognition, 106 (2), 975-983 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.005
Credit: Original Article
