How to Find the Perfect Spanish School
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
When you decide to study a language like Spanish, the numer one most important consideration is the school you will go to. Don’t gloss this over and just go to the closest one! You need to research prospective shools, their methods and materials. The difference this bit of research can make might be months or even years less time spent studying before you reach a good level of fluency in Spanish. Make sure you follow these few tips below.
Just a quick note - this article is based on UK schools but has the same priniciples for anywhere. (If you do live in the UK, you might want to check out this indepth article on studying Spanish in the UK: Spanish in the UK)
For the rest of us, lets focus first on the Spanish school where you’ll be going to classes. Perhaps surprisingly, a lot of Spanish schools don’t have a good learning environment or system in place. You can avoid these schools with a bit of research.
The majoriy of classes will inevitably slow down to meet the pace of the slowest student. Teachers have a duty to give each student in the class the same attention, so this always happens. But this problem happens in the first place when schools do not properly split their classes so each class has students at a very close level together, and also because they are not strict on students being lazy or dropping behind.
Secondly, a lot of Spanish schools are happy for their students to turn up for class. Techers do not always push the students to do as well as they can and learn at at fast pace. And the third point, many Spanish schools won’t give the students a clear idea of what is expected of them over the period they are studying, and how fast they should progress. Which is so very important for learning anything.
Here are a few ways to get around all of these. Just quickly before that, you could always opt for a good quality home-study Spanish course to avoid all these problems. Check out my review of Rocket Spanish, the most popular and successful home-study Spanish course here: Review of Good Home Study Spanish Course
Lets get back to the things you should do. When you are considering a particular Spanish school, visit or call them and ask these questions:
1. Do they divide the classes into more than ten different levels of Spanish learners? They should ideally have more than ten levels. Schools that only offer beginner, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced have way too few class levels and you will certainly be in a class with different level students.
2. How strict are they with those students who do not attend or who don’t do their homework? Unmotivated students really have a detrimental effect onthe other students. The very best Spanish schools actually remove these students.
3. Does the school and do the teachers value pushing the class at a rapid pace of learning?
4. What are the materials? The learning books and materials you use to learn Spanish are actually more important to your progress than the teacher - it’s worth investigating the course books and reading reviews and looking at them yourself.
If the school does not answer these questions to your satisfaction, you should seriously reconsider studying there.
For an article on studying Spanish in London, go here: Click Here
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