When it comes to choosing between different language schools, decision making can be very difficult. Today’s market is packed with various offers. To help you with this tough job, we’ll visit different language schools and represent them to you.
Key people and their doctrine
Today’s journey I’ll start at Sprachinstitut Berlin. Here I talked to cofounders Lilian and Jennifer.
It was in 2015 when Lilian and Jennifer came up with the idea of opening a language school. Both come from hotel management service and the customer care (or in this situation students and teachers care), which is why this is most important for them. From our conversation with Lilian, I understood that the school’s philosophy is to take each and every student as an individual. Thanks to reasonably small size of the school, they manage to keep a high rate of student satisfaction. They conduct surveys permanently and address students’ feedback immediately.
Sprachinstitut Berlin offers English and German classes at all levels, exam preparation, as well as Business classes. You can learn here both in groups and individually. Learning in a group can be quite productive because the number of students doesn’t exceed 8. They focus specifically on students who are above B2 level, as starting from this language level it is possible to prepare the language knowledge for the usage in a work environment.
The idea behind the school is to provide the best educational support for language learners. The whole teaching process here is designed to be comfortable for both teachers and learners. This means, not only learners individual needs are considered, but also teachers’ personalities. Teachers are assigned to groups, depending on the their pedagogical approaches and preferences.
giving a feeling of ``home``
Speaking of teachers, I should emphasize that they have their freedom to organize classes in the best way they see it fit, within the structures given by Sprachinstitut Berlin. “Learning with fun” – this is the motto they have. And this was obvious from talks I had with students.
Let me introduce you Joelle. She is one of the students at Sprachinstitut Berlin. She comes from France and after completing a one-month intensive course, she has reached an intermediate level.
One thing she was absolutely happy about was the reasonably small groups. This gives her more time to know the others and have a chance to speak during classes.
I had an opportunity to talk to Nick too. He is an Australian who came to Berlin 3 months ago. Nick is a young man full of positive energy doing German A2.1 in Sprachinstitut.
He was thrilled about the idea of using games and all other fun teaching approaches in the classroom.
I also met Stephanie, one of the English teachers at Sprachinstitut Berlin. We had a very interesting conversation about her life and how she turned out to be a teacher at Sprachinstitut Berlin. Born in South Africa, with German grandparents, Stefanie is a teacher with almost eighteen years’ experience. She used to live and work in South Africa, China, Scotland and most recently Germany. Stephanie worked also in banking and financing system more than 8 years, but teaching English is what her heart prefers more. From 2018 up to now she is an IELTS, TOEFL and Business English teacher at Sprachinstitut Berlin.
And of course, the most important “person” at Sprachinstitut Berlin is the small ‘motivational manager’ Lotta; a cute, very friendly and a little bit shy dog who never comes to you first if you don’t ask her to.
So, this was my first story and I hope I made the language school exploring process a bit easier for you.
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