Earlier this month, we had
some young adults join our new course called London Foodies. As you probably guessed, all the activities
and lessons were food-related, with culture, history and language squeezed in
for good measure!
The course kicked off with
a trip to Hampton Court Palace to visit the Tudor kitchens, which provided
copious amounts of food for the court of Henry VIII. We then visited Kew Gardens to find out about
their sustainable food project to battle the effects of climate change. We finally rounded it all off with a wander
around the famous Borough Market, a paradise for food-lovers!
Like our programmes for children
and teens, our adult programme immerses the students in the English language,
history and culture, giving them plenty of opportunities to interact with
native English speakers and actually use the language on the go. This flexible environment means the students
feel less pressure to “get it right” than when they’re in the classroom. The
young adults on the London Foodies course all agreed that they preferred
learning in this way with the teacher always being on hand to correct mistakes
or answer questions. They didn’t have to
face the embarrassment of having their mistakes and answers corrected in front
of everyone!
Being surrounded by native
speakers is the best way to pick up the little quirks of a language that you just don’t come across in a
classroom. One of the students said what she enjoyed most about the course was being
able to immediately ask the teacher to explain a “strange” word or phrase she
had heard on the street. For example, we heard a lady tell her child to “Put a
sock in it!” This means “stop talking”
or “cover your mouth”. This kind of immediate linguistic and contextual feedback
is something that’s almost impossible to get while studying at home or in the classroom.
Most students find that
the biggest challenges in English are spelling, pronunciation and intonation because
we don’t say the words exactly as they are written. There are also many exceptions
to the rules. For example, the “ch” in “school”
is pronounced differently from the “ch” in “choose”. Also, different syllables are stressed in words
like “clothes” and “cloth”, and although they look similar, they mean
completely different things.
We believe that the most
efficient and effective way to learn the above points is to encounter them in
context and be active in your learning. We
were pleased to discover that like the children and teens, adults too respond
to our approach of immersion and on-site correction and reinforcement. “English.
Live It. Learn It.” seems to
work across the age spectrum!
