InTuition Languages Blog

I had already realised that Veronique’s English was very strong just through talking to her but I though we’d do the Nelson test and the advanced listening to see if there were any easily identifiable areas of weakness – and there weren’t! We agreed therefore that we should focus on expansion of vocabulary into less [...]

I was interested to read about the student who works in the green building industry and the activities his tutor organised. My student, who works in the installation of photo-voltaic panels, had asked for a general/business rather than professional course, letting me off the hook slightly. I had anticipated some conversations with members of the [...]

　 It is a lovely morning here in Maidenhead. Breakfast was at 8 o’clock as usual and we had lots to talk about. The weather, last night’s football match which Daniel and I watched and The Apprentice which Michaela watched in full and Daniel and I watched only in part after the football. We agreed [...]

  Breakfast as usual at 8 o’clock and the 4-hour lesson started bang on time at 8.30. Daniel is highly motivated and had done a lot of homework yesterday afternoon/evening plus he had watched a film on TV. This morning we did a Vocabulary exercise with 20 Words/phrases for spelling, comprehension, discussion and using them [...]

You mention in your email the incorporation of excursions into the teaching programme.  As the daily teaching programme can vary from 3 hrs to 5 hrs ( I prefer not to do a 6he teaching day) and core information has to be imparted in that time, and from one student to another the required course [...]

I have found that going to see a modern play in the West End, if preceded and followed by studying the written dialogue beforehand, blends the social excursion programme with vocabulary, pronunciation, tense and sentence construction lessons.  Plays such as Enron, Blood Brothers, Onassis, Educating Rita, Art, etc. are easy to buy tickets for and [...]

We put a great deal of thought into our excursions and try to organise them around the student’s interests.  Having said that, among other things we do is the Broadstairs quiz (hardly innovative, I know) but which involves the students having to find and find out various things about Broadstairs and having to use the [...]

My experience, so far, of excursion planning is to elicit student knowledge and/or places of interest to visit (eg London) the day before. What might we see- shops, food, restaurants, people etc etc.  It is mostly a speaking and listening exercise- we read tourist information from the web sites or brochures.(depending on student level). For [...]

One of the main benefits of host teaching is the ability to reinforce what you have taught with an afternoon activity.  Clearly this has to be planned around the students needs but they can certainly achieve two objectives, providing an interesting excursion and developing their language awareness.  That is where the immersion bit comes into [...]