English Teaching Methods

English Courses at AGE

AGE offers a variety of electives including American Culture, American Slang, Business English, Academic Skills, Film and Media, Accent Reduction, and Creative Writing. These courses allow students to practice English in areas of special interest.

English Reading and Writing

AGE’s Reading and Writing classes focus on topics that are fundamental to English reading comprehension and writing capability. Instructors focus on writing topics such as the five paragraph essay, formal vs. informal English, writing for an audience, writing a resume/cover letter, etc. Instructors focus on reading topics on such topics as short stories, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. In order to choose the best possible materials, instructors refer to an exhaustive list of AGE approved class sets for their appropriate level and select individual chapters from the sets assigned to their level. Instructors supplement these texts with appropriate materials such as internet videos, magazine articles, academic texts, and photographs to enhance the course. Instructors are encouraged to adapt their lesson materials to reflect student interest.

English Listening Comprehension

AGE’s English listening teaching techniques include class participation, demonstration, and collaboration. It is important for English learners to be able to speak with confidence and use the correct grammar structures so that they are understood correctly, but it’s also crucial that they understand what they are hearing so that they are able to respond appropriately. AGE uses a wide variety of techniques and exercises that can help students improve and perfect English listening skills. These techniques include listening to audio in English, listening to native English speakers in person, watching videos with native English speakers, reviewing English vocabulary from previous lessons, watching and/or listening to news programs in English, responding to questions in English, and reviewing English grammar concepts.

Spoken English

AGE’s spoken English teaching techniques stress real-world communication and English conversation versus rote memorization. Because our communicative method is a student-centered approach, the teacher must work as a facilitator in an effort to help students develop English speaking skills for a range of purposes. Our teaching techniques are focused on increasing speaking English in classroom, as well as the pronunciation of words, and utilizing new vocabulary as much as possible. The AGE classroom maximizes dialogue through a variety of techniques, including class discussions, presentations, small group discussions, pair work, group work, special projects, and task-oriented assignments.

English-only Policy

AGE has an English-only policy so that students are be encouraged to speak English throughout the day. Because of the importance of spoken English in real-world situations, it is important that English learners feel comfortable speaking English. Our conversation lessons have elements of all English skills, but our main goal is for the student to learn to express him/her self in spoken English with proper grammar, an accurate vocabulary and superior pronunciation. A good lesson uses teaching techniques that provide many opportunities for classroom dialogue.

English Vocabulary

English vocabulary is an important part of learning and understanding the English language. English language learners are inundated with English vocabulary every day in the real world through movies, media, and daily life. A student’s vocabulary grows over time and compiling vocabulary lists from resources like books or other texts and materials is a great way to strengthen vocabulary. It is a teacher’s job to make sure that students learn and understand this vocabulary. Teachers can reinforce new vocabulary through a number of comprehension exercises of any unfamiliar words. These exercises may also assist students with the learning and retention of these new words, by using teaching techniques such as vocabulary exercises, word searches, quizzes, and games.

English Grammar

We recognize that English grammar is often a challenge for English language learners. Verb tenses, such as simple present, present continuous, simple past, past continuous, simple future, future continuous, and future perfect continuous can be difficult for English language learners to comprehend and to effectively use in real-world situations. Grammar concepts that are introduced through the techniques of discovery tend to be more effective than English grammar concepts that are introduced through more traditional teaching techniques.

While our teaching method utilizes resources such as grammar texts and other material to learn basic grammar, we feel that enacting real-life scenarios is the most effective way to teach and reinforce English grammar. AGE’s English grammar teaching techniques also use grammar exercises that mimic uses of the English language in real-world situations. Our techniques differentiate between formal and informal English so that students feel comfortable switching between the two uses with ease. We focus on refining a student’s structural English skills, and over time increasing his/her confidence using English in social situations. AGE prefers teaching techniques that are consistent with our method, whereby lessons teach and reinforce English grammar rules by enacting real-life scenarios.

AGE’s Teaching Methods

Our communicative teaching method is focused on improving communicative competence in English by using techniques where the teacher acts as a facilitator in the classroom, while encouraging students to use the English language as often as possible.

Experienced Teachers and Methods of Teaching English at AGE

All AGE teachers are native speakers of American English and have a university degree and specialized training in Teaching English as a Second Language. Teachers create highly-structured lesson plans that provide warm-up exercises, an explanation of the lesson objectives, some form of student production, and a listing of the activities used to reach the objective. Teachers allow AGE students to “discover” the objective, to give them ample opportunity to practice the objective, and then provide an assessment in order to ascertain that the objective has been understood and met. All AGE teachers have had experience studying a second language and many have spent time living abroad. In addition to being highly qualified academically, AGE teachers are warm, friendly, and supportive to all students.