How do teens learn English with BELS?
Our English courses for children and teens are designed to improve English skills while also developing 21st century skills.
Teaching a class of adults and a class of young learners are miles apart. All courses use a communicative and blended learning approach and CLIL to amplify the learning experience. Through the topics we choose and our method of delivery, we ensure that our courses of English for young learners in Malta are engaging, encourage meaningful communication and relate to aspects of their daily life and academic education back home. Here’s how that’s done:
1. Delivering Interactive, Student-centered Lessons
Using the communicative approach means that communication is at the center of all activities in our classrooms. During our courses of English for young learners, students are actively engaged and participating in a variety of collaborative tasks – roleplays, debates, pair-work, group-work, projects, presentations, acting and quizzes. Whatever the task or topic, students are actively participating and using the language throughout.
2. Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation too!
Does this mean that courses of English for young learners in Malta only concentrate on speaking skills? Definitely not. It’s a style of teaching all skills (reading, speaking, writing, listening) and systems (grammar, vocabulary, phonology, discourse) that makes the language more meaningful.
3. Using Meaningful Language
The language we teach are students isn’t the rigid, text book language. We make sure that students are being taught the real-world use of a language in all contexts, areas of life, and registers.
Together with their teacher, students will discover the language and how to use it in meaningful ways. New language points are introduced through relevant and authentic contexts that are familiar to the students to make sure the correct meaning and use of the language point is understood. After that, students are guided to use the language in a natural and personal way to show them how to incorporate in their daily lives.
When language becomes meaningful, learning is effective and memorable. This approach to teaching English to young learners boosts fluency and supports real life usage of English which benefits the learning process.
4. Choosing relevant and everyday topics
All our BELS Malta English for young learners courses are specifically designed to interest young minds. Our team of young and energetic teachers continuously update their course material to remain relevant. That way we ensure that our lessons spark practical and meaningful discussions about topics that young learners are interested in and deal with on a daily basis.
Our coursebook is a renowned publication that is based on authentic material which is adapted to all levels of English. The topics for are age-appropriate and reflect the interests and learning stages of the student. This allows teachers to help students develop their skills in English in way which is easily applicable to their daily lives.
5. Combining traditional and digital course content
Another way to replicate real-world use of English and build on all life skills is to create course content using both traditional material and digital content.
A digital version of the textbook is displayed on interactive boards during the lesson to ease learning. Apart from that, each coursebook allows access to an online learning platform with original material for self-study.
6. Using CLIL (Content and language integrated learning)
This approach refers to teaching subjects such as science, history and geography to students through a foreign language. The benefit of this is that students are learning the content and the foreign language at the same time. It helps them widen their knowledge of subjects they need to learn at school, and more importantly, how to talk about these subjects in English. This is useful for their eventual work life or studying-abroad.
To learn more about English for young learners in Malta at BELS, send us an email at [email protected] or speak to us on livechat.
