Our Philosophy
Our philosophy is based on the following principle: learning a language is much more than accumulating knowledge of grammatical rules and vocabulary. This means that our methodology is different to ‘traditional’ classes. We promote the use of authentic and contextualised language at the same time we develop the four skills of speaking, listening, writing and reading.
Apart from that we work on linguistic knowledge with a special emphasis on communicative competencies. ¿What are communicative competencies? There are many perspectives and aspects with regards to this. The first, but not more important, is the sociocultural aspect, that is to say, how to use the language; for example, manners, cultural context – which will have an international focus that reflects the future use that our students will find with people from all over the world, not exclusively a British or American English. (it is much more likely that they interact with people from other countries rather than directly with native speakers.
Returning to the idea of communicative competency, we add to this, interactional competencies, or functional, which is for example, the art of conversation with manners and respect, say sorry, offer opinions, talk about future, past and possible scenarios, gestures and body language. In addition to this, there are strategic competencies, for example, how to reason, use logic, analyse, stimulate the memory, encourage learning autonomy and the development of metacognitive strategies “know what I know”. These strategies also include the use of linguistic intuition, or as we say, “see if it works”
As you can see, learning a language is much more than practising grammar and memorising vocabulary. In summary, our philosophy supports our long-term objective is long term, and how we prepare our students so they will be able to use the language in the future, incorporating the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.
We don’t only apply this method to our English classes, it’s the base from which we teach all the languages we work with.
