Wait! What? Yes, school might have broken up for the long summer holidays and that 2015 GCSE seems distant ship smoke on the horizon, but there really is no time like the present – or maybe September – to start revising – and VICI can help!
Firstly let us say the schools in West Berkshire do a sterling job teaching people the French, German (or other foreign languages) they need to pass their GCSE and worried students rarely ask for help with their grammar, reading or writing. What they do sometime suffer from is a lack confidence when it comes to the oral exam.
We tend to get enquries for help with this aspect of the GCSE in February and March as worried students send parents into a panic and they knock at our door in Newbury town centre thinking an intensive three months of three hours a week will make all the difference.
Absolutely it will make a difference, but not as bigger difference as spending nine months coming along for just an hour a week – that will have a greater impact on their spoken abilities and not nearly as significant an impact on your wallet!
If students decided to come and see us in September, first of all parents could spread the cost of a language course over nine months, but much more importantly gives them much longer, away from the pressures of other GCSEs to really enjoy and learn how to speak the language with, well panache! Just one hour a week with a native speaker can be all it takes for the to ace the oral exam.
Recently Carol Turner, whose son Samuel had learned with VICI until he was eight, explained in a case study how he came back aged 15 with the GCSE looming.
She says: “When it came to GCSE exams it became really apparent, and this sounds awful, all he was doing was ticking the boxes in French. He simply wasn’t enjoying it and we asked him what we could do to help and he recommended we ask Nathalie for help.
“It was the right decision and immediately we saw the colour come back in his cheeks. He found fun in French again and he is enjoying it; this has had a real impact on the quality of his work and when he took his mock GCSE and got an A grade!
“What we felt was because he had lost the interest in it, the fun aspect and all he was doing was learning the vocabulary, the verbs and how to string a sentence together enough for an examination paper, we found when we went to France he was not being forward using the language.
One of his lessons with VICI was walking around Newbury talking about what he was seeing, the church, the shops and talking about rugby – completely away from the classroom environment and using vocabulary he might not get to use in the classroom but is relevant to everyday life and means he can have normal conversations in French.”
Another of our young stars here at VICI, Year 10 student Becca Willshaw has been learning at the Academy for five years and she popped in with cookies this week after getting an A* in her French GCSE Oral.
So when will your children start revising for their French GCSE? Will we see you in September? Call the VICI Language Academy today on 01635 44424 or pop in to see us in The Arcade.