Do you want to answer the question, Laura?
Yeah, it’s to answer your question, it’s. It’s a shame because it’s a normal part of language
development as well that kids do get a little bit I wouldn’t say confused between the languages, but
you know it takes them a a while sometimes to recognise that there are two distinct things. In
terms of language acquisition and development that I think it, you know it’s a shame and it’s good
to push on beyond that because sometimes kids do get mixed up and they might even add for
example try and add like a French conjugaison onto the English word. And as long as you aren’t
doing that yourself as the model as the parent as the model speaker they will learn that it’s not
correct. It’s even learning a first language. Sometimes kids will say things wrong and so you know,
like the young kids, they might say I swim instead of I swam. That’s a really normal part of language
development. Sometimes they’ll say that and they might even say it correctly then regress and say
it incorrectly again, it’s just part of of language development whether you’re learning one language
or two languages, language learning isn’t like a one linear going up, always getting better and
better. Sometimes we could do good, we do well, and sometimes the kids will go down a bit and
up and then the more they they explore the language or languages and the bilingual, the more
that they’ll learn and the more they’ll be able to put that into into two separate things in their
head. But no, it’s. I think it’s a shame to have stopped at five years old because you know it’s it’s
it’s stillso young and you can still, you know, kids do learn to to separate between the two of them,
Sasha, he’s bilingual. He speaks pretty well.
You know, I was, I was going to say we can we can like give you our own little idea on it from, you
know, our experience and obviously at the Academy we specialise in bilingual language
programmes for young children, but Laura was brought bilingually. So you’ve got like her opinion
and it, you know, it’s the real thing. And why don’t we ask Sasha? Because Sasha was also brought
to bilingually with obviously English as the main language because he was brought up in the UK
and so French for him was the minority language because he’s my son and I was the only one to
speak French to him, although it’s no coincidence that we say mother tongue. Interestingly
enough, the first word he said he spoke very early, that goes against a lot of theories and the fact
that bilingual bilingual children speak later in life because they have to adapt between both
languages, that’s not actually true.
That’s true, yeah.
Sasha started speaking when he was only about 13/14 months. He spoke very well. At 18 months
old, he hasn’t stopped speaking since, like his mother.
So Sasha, do you wanna tell us if? How you felt? About being brought to bilingual, if you’ve ever
been confused between both languages or anything like that, there is a preconception a lot of
people think children will be confused if they speak two languages. Just before Sasha gives us, you
know, accounts into his own experience, I just want to say I’ve had many, many families over the
years. People have moved. Like to the area here in the UK, saying to me we’ve been told by the
school to stop speaking in our language to the children, they are going to get confused. To me,
that’s lazy teaching. Because a lot of teachers think, well, you know, we don’t speak that language
or we
feel that the children will take longer to absorb the English language, to understand the grammar
and and and kind of, you know, be at the same level as the other children. I think it’s criminal not
to give children the gift of two languages whenever you can. So Sasha, would you like to tell us
about your own experience?
Yeah, sure. Personally, I’ve never had any sort of confusion between the languages. It’s definitely
never helped me back. If anything, it’s only given me advantages. My brain’s been opened up to so
many more words with the addition of the second language that it only helped me even in English. I
definitely agree with what my mum says about lazy teaching. I feel that like to blame a child’s like
first language development on the fact they can speak a second is extremely poor, and I think it has
absolutely 0 correlation. And and like I said previously, it will only give you an advantage and again
not to just sound like a broken record, but like my mum said as well, wherever you can to give your
children a second language you absolutely should and it can only it can only bring benefits.
Yeah, my daughter-in-law and my son, they live in San Francisco. So that her language will obviously
be English first and foremostbut my daughter-in-law is French Swiss and her parents speak French.
And so, you know, she wants she’s very keen on her learning.
Yeah, definitely they are.
I can tell her if she’s if she’s pretty familiar with how it kind of works in the household cause her
situation is very likely to be similar to mine. I’m very I’m passionate about this. I’ve written bilingual
language booksfor children. And so if she wants my take on how to make it work, I’m very happy to
pick up the phone and have a chat with her about it. It isn’t, you know, it isn’t a walk in the park. It’s
a real challenge when you are the minority language to persist, and you need. A real discipline. I’ve
always found that. It was easier for me to speak to my children in English than it was in French. But
when I see them now at the age of 16 and nearly 19, swapping from one language to another, and
not just that, being confident anywhere we go, we went to Rome for a weekend and they have a go
and they know Italian. There wasn’t a restaurant where they didn’t say hello. Thank you. Can I have
an Italian? Just because they have that confidence to try to, you know, Sasha is applying for
university and he’s been asked do you speak another language fluently? There’s no disadvantage. I
think I think the whole thing is wonderful.
Fabulous. Thank you. You’re welcome.
Ladies cause I think we only have ladies apart from Sasha today. Thank you very much for joining us
for day two of your French master class. So for those of you who were not here yesterday, very,
very briefly, my name is Natalie. I’m the owner of the VICI Language Academy, and I am running
this session today with Laura, who is our manager in our French office, we have physical premises
and Academy here in the South of England and we also have an office in France that Laura runs.
Now, yesterday we talked about two little tricks like it’s not a word I particularly like, but two ways
of tricking your brain into learning French. You talked about analysing your personality in a very
colourful way and how that can influence the way that. You absorb and retain and reuse the
language that you are learning. We also looked at the type of learner that you are. Are you more
visual? Auditory, kinesthetic. Today I wanna take this to yet another level and talk to you about
another strategy which combined with what we’ve covered yesterday is or should help you even
further. So before I start, I just want to go back a little bit on what I spoke about yesterday in terms
of my own story and how I fell into language education by accident because I didn’t have a teaching
degree and because I didn’t have the necessary knowledge or experience or I had never learned
how the brain works when it comes to a foreign language. I had to learn it on the job, so I read a
a lot of books and a lot of research, but ultimately everything happened practically in the
classroom with my student. And I felt that I had to really give an awful lot. I had to listen to them, I
had to I had to really listen to my gut feeling and go I think they’re enjoying this, I think they’re a
bit bored here. I witnessed their body language to see if they were enjoying what I was doing, or
perhaps not so much. And because of that, I started to think about lots of different ways that I
could serve my lesson on a little platter. What can I serve that they are going to enjoy tasting and
want more of? And I think that the technique that Laura and I are gonna speak to you about today
was what I was doing 20 years ago cause that’s when I started in 2002.. Can I just ask everyone to
mute themselves, if that’s OK, please. Thank you. So I think that’s what I was doing without having
a label on it without realising that it was one particular language teaching strategy. So as I also
shared with you yesterday, I ran my own language tutoring agency for six years, and then I grew a
little bit frustrated by the limitations that teaching in schools or teaching in people’s homes
presented to me. I didn’t feel that it was the right environment. School meant that learning a
foreign language was all about it being a school subject rather than it being a serious hobby, a
lifestyle, something that’s gonna give you confidence, something that’s gonna open doors for you.
It was all about the exam or the curriculum, not so much about the student. It was very student
centred. Teaching in people’s homes and then the dogs barking and then the mum’s cooking and
then dad comes home and everyone starts to have a chat and it gets disrupted. And I just thought
this is not really working, so I’m working very hard on finding out what resources I should use for
my students. Then I’m kind of analysing the environment. In which they need to be in order to
learn best and all of this, this little bland meant that I finally, after you know many hours and many
months and many years managed to put together a blend of different learning resources, different
learning techniques, different environments that worked very well for my students, and I really
then started to see tangible results. What we’re going to talk to you about today is called blended
learning. And it’s exactly what it says on the 10. It’s a blend of things that you’ve put together to
make your learning very efficient. Now blended learning in the last few years has become fairly
popular. Interestingly enough, it has become popular through the use of technology. In language
learning for many, many years and and and and decades, people would say there is no way that
you can learn a foreign language without being in a room interacting with a human. Then apps
came along and computers and computer programmes started to be extremely popular and people
went ohh, that’s not so bad after all. Could I use this? Could I use that on the subject of app?
Which is a question I get asked a million times a day and should I use them and how do they work
and are they good? We can do an entire session on this, if you like. So, blended learning came
about because of technology. And if you look at the strict sense of blended learning or the kind of
classic definition, it will say it is a blend or a mix between technology and human interaction or you
know, a classroom setup for your language lessons. I think this is a little bit too simplistic. As far as
I’m concerned, I think that blended learning or its definition, or the variety of resources means that
we can push this definition way further. To me it can be formal lessons or learning, informal
learning, structured, unstructured. It can be obviously virtual, it can be guided, it can be
self-studies, it can be something that’s really structured, something that’s completely unstructured.
Actually, I was gonna say I can give you a list of all the different blends of learning that I can think
of that I think are extremely useful and that I’d love you to think about. And I’ll put that in our
Facebook group when we finish this class today, an entire list to really make you think about what
it could be. When I sent you the e-mail yesterday, I said can I ask you to think about something that
you have recently learned and learned well and that you’ve been able to create memories of
whatever it was. Have you thought about this and how did you actually learn to master whatever it
was? Have you learned a brand new recipe? I a little bit ashamed to say that being French and very
French at that, I do not know how to cook, but bourguignon, which is probably in
the top five of the lovely French recipes that everyone knows. And I said to a friend the other day,
I’m sure my boys would love that, they love me, they would love mum to cook. You know, I really
thought about learning to do that. I am not particularly good at reading instructions. Instructions
don’t mean a lot
to me. I have to read instructions several times to understand and I get quite muddled up. That’s
how my brain works. So my children in their youth and wisdom said mum, why don’t you watch a
YouTube video? And I was like ohh of course, so I watched a YouTube video and suddenly realised
that this was great for me. It was very lively. I felt someone was talking to me. I could do it while
the person was talking to me. Probably was nowhere near as good as that guy on the video, but I
was able to do it. So can you think about something that you have learned recently, if it’s
something about a foreign language, it’s a bonus, but I’ll just use, you know, a recipe, anything that
you could share with us. Ohh, I like that I’ve just completed a Tai Chi teacher training course and
found initially that it was too formal. I’m loving that you’re saying this because in my list of blends
there is formal and informal as well. It all fell into place when we start doing workshops, more
visual stuff and things I could actually do in practise. So Usha, there is a chance that you are a
kinesthetic learner. Yeah. So you need to do in order to learn. Absolutely. I think for me, what’s
really really interesting is that if you look at what we’ve covered yesterday, think about your
personality with those colours that we looked at and think about the type of learner that you are,
such as yourself, most probably being a kinesthetic learner and, think about all these different
blends of learning a foreign language. If you combine them together, that’s the real magic potion,
like you will be unstoppable. There’s nothing that you can do when it comes to acquiring a new
foreign language, because everything is into place for you. It’s very personalised. Now, you know, I
talked about if let’s give examples, if you are thinking about your own French studies, so it could be
that you have non scheduled activities. So a podcast, there’s a podcast in France that you really
like. But this is not something that you schedule to listen to. You might wanna listen to it when
you’re in the car, you might wanna listen to it when you’re in the supermarket doing your shopping.
It’s not scheduled but it is going to immerse you in the language on a very regular basis, something
that you are going to be really quite familiar with. But then you know that you need to be some
schedule and you need to have, sorry, some schedule and structured activity or activities into your
language programme to really boost your level. So that’s where your lessons can happen when you
feel that you need something that is quite, you know, structured, but maybe a little bit more
entertaining. You might go to a nice conversation class with a glass of wine that can be very
beneficial, but that’s very informal. And by the way, alcohol works wonders for bilingualism, it’s not
me saying that it is science, not too many, but a couple of glasses will really help boost your
language skills and your confidence inhibitions. Go out the window. It’s all about this. Then you can
go. OK, so I’ve done some instruction stuff. I’ve done some formal and informal stuff. I really need
to figure out what really is the difference between passive composing and imperfect. This time, I
need something formal and I need something structured and this time I need human interaction
because I’m not doing it on my own. It’s a little bit like having an entire menu of techniques of
resources, of people, of technology that you can use and pick from for you in your quest to be.
Very proficient in French. Does that make sense so far? So Sarah said I do use Duolingo each day
for four languages. Wow. To get used to hearing new things. Been doing this for six months. Sarah,
that is super interesting. Would love to hear more about your experience on that perhaps? We
have, I believe is in days 7, we have a Q&A and we are really inviting everyone who’s been taking
part in this master class to share a lot of their experiences and we can be there to comment, you
know, advise or help you a little bit further. So it would be really interesting to to hear this now. I’m
going to pass on to and I’m gonna ask now, Laura, to converse with you and tell you a little bit
more about blended learning. The one little thing I want you to be careful of is I am the big and fat
biggest fan there is of blended learning. As I said, I started it 20 years ago. It didn’t have a label. I
didn’t really know what I was
doing. When Laura came to the Academy for a job interview about 2 1/2 years ago now, we just
ended up, we got on really well., and then we just ended up talking about blended learning and we
found a huge common interest and we just chatted, chatted, chatted and talked about loads of
ways that we were going to improve our language programme. So we are huge fans, it absolutely
100% works. It will make you more motivated, it will really boost your engagement and it will really,
really help you with the language comprehension. Just one little thing, be a little careful about how
it is presented to you. Blended learning has proven to increase the learner’s confidence. Why?
Because it’s personalised. There is so much variety that people never get bored. There’s always
something for them. There’s always something new. There’s always something to spark their
interest. And really, that’s where your language learning should be like, because we learn a foreign
language throughout our lives, you know, even our own mother tongue but it can be a little bit of a
mess if it’s not done well. Here at the Academy, when we put language programmes together for
our students, be in groups or one-on-one, be very careful about the blended learning methods
that we use. We never actually decide on the techniques, technologies, you know, resources or any
other things that we’re going to use before we’ve analysed your personality that we spoke about
yesterday or the type of learner that you are, the level that you are currently at or where you want
to go, so just a little word of caution on that blended learning is amazing and it absolutely 100%
works. But it must be done well. It must be done in a structured way, otherwise it can just really be
very messy and confusing, and you could, under being fairly overwhelmed because you’re using all
these different things and you’re not really getting to the desired result. I’m going to ask you,
Laura, to now take over. I’m just reading in the chat that Lynn makes a good point. Is it possible to
ask everyone to put all the little messages in the chat public so we can all see them because I think
they’re all extremely. So Sarah said I would say that you miss out on the accent using the app. I’m
I’m I’m very happy to talk to you about apps and how we feel about it or how? They should be used
et cetera. Perhaps we can have a really short Q&A at the end of this session, if that’s OK with you.
I’d be more than happy to share my thoughts on that. But for now, I’m gonna ask Laura to give you
her take on it. As I just said, I know that she’s a big fan of blended learning, we also work on
Erasmus plus programmes. What Erasmus plus programmes are, they are training programmes for
teachers throughout Europe. And we have an accreditation from the Council of Europe and we
deliver some of these courses and Laura worked on an entire course to deliver to teachers on
blended learning. So I love talking about it. But she’s way more of an expert than I am Laura, over to
you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. So just to really touch on what Natalie has said then from a, you
know from a research standpoint as well, blended learning is so, so important and it has really
been proven to increase your motivation, your engagement and your immersion in the language.
So one of the reasons that it is such an important part of language learning notice that we said you
know a part of it because you do need the sessions with coaches or with teachers to be able to
practise the language as well. But then having a separate part where you are focusing on working
on your own and with other resources, it’s really important. So, partly because you’ll be in a lot of
the blended learning that we offer you’ll get a huge amount of resources that are very authentic.
So this means they’re resources that aren’t made for learners in particular. But that is made for
native speakers of the language and then the scaffolding, we call it so the things the structure, that
is around those articles, those videos is then created for learners. So it’s to help you understand
native language and to understand a language that is very authentic and used by native speakers
for native speakers, because that’s the goal in learning the language, it’s great to be able
to understand what my Duolingo owl is saying to me, but people don’t speak like that in real life, so
really, it’s really about the authentic and secondly, is that everything is contextual and we’re
blended learning if we’re looking at different resources that provide us with articles and magazines,
with podcasts, to be able to learn, it is contextual. So this is really important when we are young
we learn our first language and by the time or multiple languages as we grow up, as we discussed
earlier. Everything is in context. We aren’t just given flash cards and sentences to translate. It’s all
given in context, and that is hugely important to help you learn that and the final thing is that it is
meaningful. That means you are reading the sample a little article from one of the magazines that
we have or you are watching a video that is in your target language and you are gaining some kind
of meaning, some sense from the resource as well. So it’s not just looking at the the language that
is there, but also bringing something meaningful into your life as well, and that really are three of
the central pillars as to how we learn. So just to touch on another thing that Natalie really said was
that the IT can get a bit of a mess if it isn’t structured. There are so, so, so many different ways that
we can incorporate landed landing into language programmes. There are so many different
resources that are available to you, if you just go ahead. Everything you don’t know where to go,
you know where to start. It is going to get a little bit messy. That is why it really does need to be
structured and guided by somebody as well guided by experts. So I personally I’ve worked in quite
a few different teaching environments internationally, and one of the things that I really, really love
about being here at VICI as well, is to what the extent to which the blended learning that we have
integrated into our programmes. That means that it isn’t just we have online teaching and then we
have the different resources you can have on this side is that everything is merged together,
everything is blended together. So this means that for myself as a coach, when I’m teaching
English, when I’m teaching French, I’m very aware of what my students are doing. In their blended
learning, it’s me that’s guiding them, that’s helping them. Sometimes they’ll do extra things that
they want to do on their own as well, which is great, it’s always good to do extra but I’ve always
helped them to understand what they need to work on what skills they need to work on, what kind
of topics they need to work as well. So it really is, you know, being able to explore the language
with all of the different resources that are possible, but while still being guided and helped by
somebody who is an expert in language acquisition and helping you learn how to learn language as
well. So this really important thing is that the thing everyone presses on is the importance of the
relation between blended learning between the resources you have and between the in class
things you have, everything needs to be relevant and combined to help you increase your learning
as well if you spend in class doing something, for example you’re working just on a topic with your
coach and then afterwards your blended learning, you are just for example looking at grammar all
the time. Just doing something because you’re not quite sure how to do it on your own. How to do
how to sort of structure your own language. It’s gonna be a lot harder. Whereas if your coach has
worked on a specific topic and then they advise you, OK, actually in this video watch today we
heard quite a lot of for example the present perfect. They suggest that you work on building the
skills that we’ve started to touch on in class. Sometimes it can be the other way around as well in
blended learning. We have some that would have flipped classroom. So this means that your coach
will provide you something to do before the class, and then what you do in the class will build on
that as well. So as you can see, there are many different ways that we can integrate this within your
learning. This is all great and nothing I have said a lot, but just to give you some kind of concrete
examples of really what we’re talking about because you know that’s why you’re here, That’s what
you wanna know. I wanna speak to you about 1 client I had recently. He’s a man. He’s in his 20s and
he said he was very academic. At school, he kind of just wasn’t excelling in any subjects and in
particular languages were just over his head.
In the French school system, you often have to do 2 languages, English and another language. For
him, it was just too much. It wasn’t, you know, he wasn’t very academic and he really struggled.
However, once he got into the working world, he really started to to grow professionally and to
excel. However, now he’s been told that, you know, in order to progress, he does need to learn a
little bit more english he does need to have at least the basic skills. He came to us in a bit of a
stress panic. He didn’t you know, he knew that he said I’m not good at languages I can’t learn
English. I’ve tried. I’ve tried it at school. I cannot do it. I’m sure there are lots of people that can
really deal with that as well, and really relate to that. So I would. Like to tell you now that he is very
capable of holding a conversation in English and he is really excited about his work in that place as
well. So what we did when he arrived is that OK, we now have to help you. So we did all of the
stuff we looked at yesterday. We really looked at his personality and colour, we really looked at his
loss of learning and he really found that he is much more of a yellow he wants to do things that are
fun and he wants to do things that aren’t too structured. He’s not a blue. He doesn’t want to have
everything written down on the rules, which is very much what we learned at sports school. So
what we did was we really found the mix of blended learning resources that would be best suited
to his learning. So we used a specific platform that we have called Lingua Attack and this is
something that has a lot of authentic videos, and then as I said earlier, that has sort of a scaffolding
around it to help them understand these videos. There was a lot of gamification, so this just means
games that are based around the language that you’ve heard in the video this was perfect. He felt
like he was just gonna because we have it. It’s on your phone as well. You have it as an app. So he
felt like he was just playing games on his phone. He loved it. And actually, he was like you know
what I’m actually doing 20/25 minutes of language learning a day just from being on my phone
instead of waiting for the metro or starting on his metro journey, he’s there doing his games, it’s
just such a better way of integrating it into his programme. For him, we really focused on things
that were very, very unique that were very fun that we gained, and focusing on the fluency rather
than focusing on some of the more grammatical rules. Whereas he said he’s not very academic, he
doesn’t enjoy reading long articles either, so we really focused on the resources that we could
provide to him with their help and for that saying and I’m happy to say that when we speak, when
he comes into class now, we begin always in English and he’s really capable of holding a
conversation on this by himself in English. So this is 1 way that we really take your personality to
provide you with the resources that are available and that are best for you. Another way I like to
talk to you about is someone a little bit different. So this is a lovely lady who is English learning
French like herself. She has always enjoyed French, she speaks a little French and she just really
wanted to bring herself to the next level. So she comes to us and she explains to us the issues that
she has, she would really like to learn. So she was very, very keen on all of the different things that
we had and especially we spoke to her about some of our technology related programmes. So for
example the applications and the websites that we have she was very interested, but a little bit
nervous to do with the technology. So we spent some time and we were exploring the different
options that we have but in the end it was the technology part of it was just a little bit too
complicated so she wasn’t that technologically savvy, she was a little bit older, so she hadn’t grown
up with it the technology was just adding an extra barrier that saw her was posing a little bit an
extra problem.
So what we did is we said doesn’t matter. We have so many resources, we subscribed her to a
bilingual magazine, a French English bilingual magazine, and she gets the the magazines delivered
to her door, weekly, monthly and then she gets to read them by herself. This lady said that she
loves to read already. So what we did was we kind of added into her little schedule at the end of
the day she sits down she has a cup of tea, a glass of wine maybe, and she reads an article. She
just looks at it. They have again this scaffolding that I spoke about, so helping you understand the
authentic language, but with lots of different supports around it to help you understand the
grammar structures, help you understand the vocabulary, help you understand the meaning,
because that’s what we want. Language doesn’t exist without meaning. We need to understand the
meaning before anything else. So now, a couple times a week, she sits down. As I said, with a cup
of tea, glass of wine. She reads an article too, and then after we discuss what she’s read as well,
but often she’ll send me the picture of the article that she’s read and I can pack classes based
around that article for her or for example if there’s something that she’s struggled a little bit more
with the meaning, then I can use this and integrate it into my own teaching for her. So this is a
really, really excellent way of showing you how blended learning needs to have everything
together. Everything needs to be connected. So communicating, you know, having that opportunity
to communicate with your coach and tell them what you have been working on, what you’ve
enjoyed working on, it’s really just an excellent way of really rounding everything out and making it
all very, very interconnect. So with this lady as well, so obviously as you can imagine, her friends
really improved because she was being exposed to a lot of authentic language, and secondly,
having a subscription to bilingual magazine like that was amazing for her French cultural
knowledge. She enjoys her holidays in France every summer, and she has even said that with the
magazine she’s learned a lot. more colourful language,a little bit of slang and some language that
is much more reflective of how it is spoken in France, which again isn’t necessarily something that
we find on these stand alone acts like Duolingo because we don’t have the the very authentic and
the very relevant language that we actually use in day-to-day life. So alongside the language part
she also had this sort of code language, slang and a lot of contextual knowledge as well, so she
really learned a lot about the culture of France. Read the articles on different French singers, which
then allowed her to go and explore on YouTube and find different French songs that she loved, this
added a whole new dimension to something from her learning just from something that she found
in the Magazine, which she absolutely love so this is really just to show you there are different
things. That we can do and with this lady we you know, we we found a solution that we we we
have to work for her and it wasn’t working exactly how much she wanted to which means that we
we switched it up and we found something that was better blended learning is not and it’s not an
approach where one-size-fits-all. Blended learning is something where we work very closely with
you, with skills that you have the skills that you wish to have and the interest and the type of
learner that you are. And then we create a very structured programme that is based around all of
those things that we know that are work for you. That means if you do find technology difficult, we
are going to waste time trying to put you in front of a technology, a computer that you struggle to
use.
If you find that reading long articles, it’s just not for you because you don’t enjoy doing that in your
own time. We’re not going to find a subscription to a magazine, and if you read it every week, what
we do really is very, very personalised and very, really centred around you as the learner and that
really is the addiction. How does the learning work? So I just wanted to show you a little thing that I
have so obviously, as I said, we have a lot of different resources. So I hope you can see my screen.
Yep, excellent. So I just wanted to show you this little thing that I put together. So when you arrive
or when plants have a beautiful example, we like to give them an overview of the resources that
are available to them. So when I put together a comprehensive list there’s just a few different
things that we might have. For example, we have sort of different language events that we have,
we have content on Facebook homework that we’ve done at VICI, the bilingual magazine, different
types of blended learning approaches that we have. So what I’d like everyone to do is just have a
good look at what we have here on the board and see if there are, if there’s anything on here that
immediately speaks to you that you think, for example, I would be really interested in doing that,
whether that is reading a magazine, whether that is attending cultural events that are run or
whether that is using Lingua Attack, which is a video based platform so you can have a look and
maybe we can write in the chat if there is anything that you feel would be you know that really
sparks your interest, something that you really feel would be a big benefit to you as a learner and
then maybe we can discuss kind of why as well you think this would benefit you and we can even
link this back to what we did yesterday with the learning styles as well so chat if anyone has any
ideas.
I really like this, Laura, because you’ve even mentioned the VICI learning diary. It really goes to
show how you can find lots and lots of you know options and variations, and lots of little tips to
help you with your language studies. What is the VICI Learning diary? Well, having been teaching
French for many, many, many years, I realised how long have we had it? Maybe four years 3/4.
Years I realised that we used to give our students a lovely folder, lovely VCI folder where they could
just put all their little resources for their classes, but there was no real structure so after a while I
used to look at all their notes and think this is a little bit of a mess like if they have to review their
notes later on, how do they actually think, OK, I’m going to revise this one, I’m going to do that. It’s
all a little bit messy so I thought, really, we shouldn’t give them a folder like that we should create
a notebook instruction notebook for them, which we called the Learning Diary as a matter of fact it
should bear with me because I have mine right here as well.
There it is. There it is. You know, there it is actually. I’ve got the desktop as well which I always use,
but I’ll show you. In a minute, but. So the learning diary, what we’ve done is we’ve created a
notebook with 100 pages for 100 lessons, so here you can write your notes here and there for each
class. And here you can decide either right at the end of the class during the class, or when you
review your notes maybe 24 or 40 hours later, again, very dependent on how you like to learn key
expressions, verbs, vocabulary. Think about two key expressions just two new verbs, and perhaps 2
new words that you would like to remember and you’d like that to be part of the French language
that you use on a regular basis. Don’t try and do any more, a little bit Noah’s Ark, you know, the
animals went two by two. That’s what we’re doing here. You know it needs to be a digestible chunk
of language, so two different key expressions, 2 new verbs, 2 new words. It doesn’t even have to
be two, but not much more than that. This way everything is really structured. You are focusing
your brain on what you want to try to remember and when you’ve had 50-60 lessons and you go
back, it’s very easy to revise your notes. It also means that you are asking your brain to focus on
the language that is important to you within any given language lesson about 60 to 70% will be
relevant to you. There’s probably 30 to 40% that you might never use a context in which you may
not be often even grammar points that at that time may not be so relevant to you. If you can
remember about 60 to 70% of your language class you’re a winner, definitely. So we’ve created
those little learning Diaries for those reasons, and this is also part of our blended learning method.
Another thing that we’ve got which we quite like are these like desktop pads and you know they’re
a little gadget we’ve created them and we had an open day, a language festival at the Academy
here last year, but they’re brilliant. I have one on my desk everyday and you know,
it’s like when will I attend my next language class? What I love most about my language learning
journey if none of our languages, what do I need to do today so you can definitely also use that for
a shopping list or anything else things to discuss with my language coach as you develop as a
language learner along your language learning journey. You will be thinking about it during the day
the more you immerse yourself in that language and the more you’ll start to question little things
or think about things during the right here write down what you want to discuss with your
language coach next time you’re in class. What verb have I come across today? It could be in a
lesson, it could be in a podcast, a new word. So obviously you don’t have to do that every day, but
having something like that means that the language is present, it is surrounding you all day and
every day. That is also part of the blended learning method. Thank you, Laura.
Thank you to Lynn as well, who? Says she loves these ideas. Thank.
You. Yeah, I didn’t see that.
Yeah, but no, exactly. And tell him what Matthew said as well. Anyone here is a visual learner as I
am? But you’ll see that my learning diary is full of colours to help me learn the different but here is.
saying what little grammar object pronouns in Spanish, so I have all of my little colours, which I
really feel is for me as a visual learner, is what helps me the most. So that’s the nice thing about
about all these results is as well we can really adapt them to your different learning styles that you
have and that we’ve helped to identify. And so I just want to have a look in the chat, some of the
things that we have a lot of people who say they enjoy the paper resources and magazines is very
popular. I agree with that. You know, technology is really a huge part of our everyday life.
Sometimes it’s nice to go back to paper. Sometimes it’s nice to have that physical in your hand and
for it to feel like something that you enjoy as well and for your learning to be reflective of things
that you do in your in your own time as well. If you enjoy reading books, if you enjoy reading
magazines, if you enjoy reading the newspaper, then the lovely part about lens lining is that you
can then do that and in your target language. So a lot of the sort of the younger teenagers that we
work with as well, especially they all a lot of them say to me, I want to be able to watch Netflix in
English. That’s a good ambition. You know something that they want to do so often, what we do is
we provide them with resources. That is working, especially on videos and TV shows and films, and
then with different learning resources based around that TV show and that is something they love
that they’re very motivated to do and something that I really enjoy because it’s essentially the
homework is to go and watch something on TV and watch Netflix and they love that you know I
don’t know that’s why you have two teenage boys, I’m sure you know what it’s like.
Can I interrupt you really quickly? You know when you talked about the magazine, and that’s when
I really wanted to emphasise earlier on about this idea of blended learning, not just being about
the resources that you use, the books, the technology, the people in the room with you or not. It is
also about, you know, is it formal, is it informal, is it structured, is it an instruction, is it scheduled?
Is it unscheduled? Reading a magazine could be used when you are learning French during your
your class time. I know that the Lady Laura mentioned earlier absolutely love that magazine. So I
know that now we are using the magazine as content for her language lessons but I also knew that
some students who don’t really want to use the magazine in the class when they use it at home
with a glass of wine or a cup of tea and that’s when the informal learning takes place. So it’s really
all these little ingredients that add to the bland talking about the bland. Alright. Do you have that
picture of the blend?
Yes, I did. Here we are.
Ohh, that’s my favourite picture. You know, like you for those of you who were here yesterday I said
I love analogy today we talked about a diet and having food allergies and how that can relate to
learning a foreign language. Today we’re talking about a bit of a smoothie in the blender to help
you to learn foreign languages, you know this is lighthearted. But it works, it truly is the little magic
potion that comes out of these beautiful pink blender.
Yeah. And it’s so true that, you know, just as when you’re making a smoothie, you can add in as
much as little of what you want. Yesterday, Natalie I had a meeting. I was actually making a
smoothie and I’m eating and this might sound weird. I love banana and spinach smoothies and
Natalie went why? If it’s spinach in a smoothie, enough of awful. It’s the same for learning. Some
people love the magazine, other people think no, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to read that,
so that’s just the thing about it that we can pick and we can add as much or as little as of different
things as you would as you would like and find the perfect combination for you as well no one
makes the perfect smoothie the first time round, sometimes it takes a lot of practise to find what’s
good for you and I also want to say that I’d like to go and we’ve got a little bit of time now we’ve
got 10 minutes left, so we can answer any of your questions. There are some really interesting
comments in the chat that I would like to go over. I’m just checking my notes to make sure I’ve got
the right, on day 7 which is Sunday, you’ll obviously, I mean you get daily emails from us to tell you
what’s happening, but on Sunday we are going to have a bit of a kind of personal linguistic
assessment for you, so anyone who is present, if you want to come to the table with your
personality, if you’re happy to share the kind of learner you are, where you’re acting young journey
where you want to go so we can say we think that’s what you need, we think you should do this.
We’re going to have a bit of a customised you know language blended menu for you that’s
happening on Sunday, just heads up on that so. Tina said you speak a lot of podcasts on top of your
head which one do you recommend, please? So Tina, it depends on where you’re at at the
moment. I record my own podcast called French Conversation with Natalie. It’s a podcast that I
recommend for intermediate learners. Plus because the entire conversation is in French, I interview
people who are French, so it’s spoken by two native people now we talk about anything to do with
the UK and France: Any differences on school education on the health system, on eating habits. So
if you know the UK well or if you know France well, you’re very likely to be quite familiar with the
topic, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to understand, but it is spoken at real speed, so for people
who are complete beginners, I think it will be a little bit too overwhelming and I’m not sure they’ll
get the most out of it? But if you private message Sasha, who’s our concierge for the day, tell him,
the level that you’re at and he can send you two or three podcasts that we think are at your level
and of good quality, ours included if it’s relevant to you. Gina said: I’m definitely a visual learner,
YouTube is my friend, you see, I think that YouTube is for visual learner but also kinesthetic
learners because when you watch YouTube you do it. And the way you know, doing something in
order to learn it is part of the kinesthetic learning preference. YouTube is definitely Great. Lynn says
I read news articles in French every day, I set my news feed to send me French articles andn English
articles. That’s very good for those of you who go on your laptop early in the morning, something
that’s really good if you like to read the news, if you don’t then pass it. As Laura said, it’s all about
you and what you like, but if you like to read the news when you arrive at work in the morning, or if
you work on your computer, having, for example, the BBC and Lamont Online or another online
newspaper is very useful because let’s face it when they talk about Ukraine, they will talk about it
on both papers, they talk about the French elections, presidential elections. They are not going to
talk about it as much on the BBC, but there will be articles about it. So actually looking at the way
the news portrayed in English and then in French can actually be quite helpful, but I would say you
need to start being fairly advanced about this and I love what Lynn says. My work life is so
structured that my personal life needs to be unstructured. Do you know what? Not only that is
true, but I am a firm believer that this is how you will best learn or improve your French because I
know you speak it very well already. When we teach French, we do what we call high activity, low
active. High activity is when the student is full of energy, raring to go. We’re just starting the lesson
with pumped up with caffeine, with super enthusiastic. We’re going for it. We then use high
activities, which means that the learner is ready to take on quality of new knowledge. Then we use
low activity. That’s when we know that you know no one can sustain like a high alert level of
attention for a very long time. So then we know we have chosen what we call low activities just as
interesting, it could be completely relevant to what we’ve just spoken about, but it’s not
something that is going to demand a lot of brain energy. Structured and unstructured activities are
exactly the same. Do not think that listening to a podcast is irrelevant because you can only learn
when you’re in the classroom with a teacher. By all means, we are talking about mastering French
a foreign language you need human interaction. There are no two ways about it. We might have a
little bit of time to talk about apps. Even clever genius people who invent apps will tell you that
you’ll never be fluent by just using the app. We’re talking about a method, a way to communicate a
method of communication. You need human interaction, but please don’t underestimate all the
unstructured activities that you can use every single day. That’s actually we’re going a little bit
further in that, I believe on day five when we talk about life in French and we’re giving you loads of
little tips on how to adopt lots of you know, kind of little tricks if you like every day to help you
with the language absorption. So you gave the recipe very good you should have given it in French.
I know I should have done it.
So I live in the UK, but I’m German. So Gina. Gina, you are looking to be trilingual then? Great.
Which really should help, because even though English and German have the same roots, it’s so
different from French. It’s all about the language mechanics we talked about that yesterday, didn’t
we in our introduction understand language mechanics is extremely important if you’re looking to
be proficient. Can I just ask I’m just checking the time. We’ve got 2 minutes left. Any questions?
Does you know? Does this make sense? Everything that we’ve covered, is there anything in
particular you’d like to ask? Well, I hope you’ll be there on day. 7 because on day seven I would
really, really love everyone to come along so we can have really open conversation about our
experience of the language of experience in the language of learning the language of this will be
really rich. I just, yeah, absolutely human interaction. So with the last two minutes we’ve got, I’ll
just have a quick word about apps because this is the question that I get asked every single day. A
lot of people think that language professionals such as Laura and I are going to say bad things. That
apps absolutely not. I think that apps have a place in your language learning acquisition. I think
they are an amazing tool. Again to add to the plan, they are an amazing tool to switch your brain
into French. If you are spending 20 minutes on the bus or in the train or two hours on the plane,
using an app is brilliant. You’re telling your brain that now is the time for a little bit of French. It’s
really good to see vocabulary written. It’s the same word coming back again,
because apps are designed for you to acquire basic language like all the words that we generally
use on a regular basis all the time. Where apps can’t help, and I think that a few of you have
mentioned it is accents. OK, no one’s talking to you, no one’s telling you whether you should say
like this or like that. You can’t ask questions. There is no human interaction. Action and language
again is a mode of communication. So when you are interacting with someone there is way more
to be considered than just the spoken words. You know, there’s the intonation, there’s the body
language, there’s whether one person is speaking or several people are interacting around you.
And so an app cannot help you with this. However, I do believe that if you enjoy grabbing your
phone and doing some exercises, again, some people love it, some people hate it. I really do believe
that an app can truly help you. Along your language learning journey. It it has a place it just. Cannot
do it all. So I think Laura’s gone because she was teaching. It’s 2:00 PM where she lives and she was
teaching. Has this session been useful? Yeah. Excellent. Remember that. I’ll send you a bit of a
recap e-mail. You can reach me by e-mail, by WhatsApp on Facebook. We will play the recording in
the Facebook group again tonight and I very much look forward to seeing you tomorrow, same
place. Same time.
Au revoir, merci!

Thank you everyone for being here today.
Day three is about one reliable method to set up your language goals.
This is one that I particularly like for a lot of reasons, which I’m sure I’ll be talking a little bit more
about but essentially I do not see the point of having a huge enthusiasm, the learning of foreign
language, regardless of the level that you want to be at.
To then learn all about great strategies to get yourself going to then not have a plan.
About where you actually want to go.
On day one, we looked at two really important strategies to help you kickstart your brain into either
learning French or improving your French skills by, you know, adapting better strategies on Day 2.
We went a little bit further on talking about resources and the whole blended learning.
I was gonna say attitude. It’s not an attitude, it’s a methodology to help you that a little bit.
Further, so today it’s all about setting language goals and I’m going to talk a little bit about my
background again, because to me it is so relevant to most of the content in this master class.
So as you know, when I started, I didn’t have the experience. I didn’t have the knowledge so.
So quite frankly, I went out there. I bought books, you know, whatever books the BBC was coming
out with or I went into charity shops.
So for those of you who live in the UK, you’ll know exactly what I mean. They are full of books that
people are getting rid of. So that was my Saturday afternoon leisurely activity and.
Everything or anything that I could find. Any methodology, any book, any grammar book. I would just
buy it.
And the truth is that when you follow a traditional French course or a textbook course, you are
following someone else’s curriculum.
And it doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It’s normally full of brilliant content.
But it’s not identifying your goals. What you need and what.
You want to learn.
So it is OK to kind of go there. We’re going to do that. But actually, when you go over.
All these resources when you revise what you’ve learned.
You then have another job.
Of picking out what’s important to you.
If you never want to.
Buy a property in France.
Learning all the bits around the dining room.
May not be particularly interesting or relevant, so the idea with today’s master class is that you want
to decide what you want to focus on in terms of what you.
Want to learn
And more broadly.
The knowledge that you want to have acquired by the time you may decide to stop learning French
and just practise it regularly or live on what you’ve got, we all know that. You know, learning a foreign
language, the journey and here at the Academy we really, really.
Want to instill in our
Learners that it is all about the journey.
If you want that journey, however, to be enjoyable and enriching and rewarding.
You need to know where you’re going.
Whether you’ve decided to start next month. And you give yourself 1,2,3,10 years to learn a
language.
Or whether you’ve decided that it’s just simply going to be part of your lifestyle, so it’s something.
That you might do forever.
Regardless, you need to understand where you’re going. You need some.
Sort of road Map. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that you will be discouraged at some point you know.
Let’s face it, I would be lying if I was saying to you that learning a foreign language is always, you
know, kind of flawless and easy, because it isn’t.
Sometimes you do very well, sometimes you plateau. Sometimes you feel that you’re not really
improving. It’s just part of the process.
But when you have an angle or or when you have a journey in mind, or when you have a road map of
where you’re going.
Then even when he gets a little challenging it’s still worth it cause you know where you’re going now,
I did warn you on day one that I love analogies.
So there is one for you and I see Laura smiling cause I use that one a lot cause my favourite so, I love
hiking in the mountains. So I come from Jura. So kind of low to medium mountains. I love skiing. I
love when I’m in Jura.I go, I do what I’ve got Nordic walking. I’m gonna go in the Alps. I just go and
walk in the mountains with my Labrador for hours.
The thing is this: When I take on a path and I am going, you know, at the top of a skiing piste. So it’s
really quite steep in the summer, it’s enjoyable. It is something that I want to do. I know that it’s
going to get hard at some point, but I know when I get to the top I feel really good. Whilst I’m
walking up, sometimes I’m finding it really quite challenging and I get really tired and I really need to
push through not to give up sometimes I think it’s quite a leisurely walk. There’s a bit of a flat bit and
it is quite nice. It’s a bit of a breeze and it’s all really lovely.
Sometimes this happened to me last time I went hiking in the Alps. I ended up in a big field with lots
of wild cows and you know I was a bit like, oh, are they friendly, are they not? You know, come my
Labrador, go and chat to them and play with them. Or are they gonna be a little bit aggressive, I
wasn’t really sure. If I had known where I was going on that mountain I would have probably gone
back down. I probably would not have risked going through the entire herd. But I knew where I was
going cause there was a clear path and it was also indicated where I needed to go, so I knew it was
safe because there was no way they would let people cross this farm if this wasn’t safe. Where, you
know, a lot of people go there, a lot of tourist.And then I got to the top and then I had a little rest.
And then I felt really happy with myself. And then I felt, oh, there’s another part there. So shall I just
go home for today, or can I push for another hour or so?
The reason why I’m telling you all of this is to me, me going up my mountain is a little bit like you
learning or improving your French. You know, this is something that you want to do. You know that
sometimes it’s going to be really entertaining and it’s going to be fairly easy. And you’re gonna
breathe through. Sometimes it’s going to be really challenging and you’re going to really doubt your
ability to either learn the language or go to the next level or even be bilingual one day. Sometimes
some unexpected things are going to cross your path.
And then at some point you would have reached a level where you’re going to think “Alright. Is this
good for me?”, you know? “Shall I go a little further or not?”, this is exactly like learning a foreign
language. But the truth is that it is super enjoyable, and you want to be there, no one forces me to
climb up the back mountain with my dog you know, this is something that I really love doing. I find it
relaxing. It’s good for my health. It pushes some of my boundaries. I probably wouldn’t do it every
day, I probably wouldn’t. That wouldn’t be my work, but as a serious hobby is something that I
absolutely adore doing and I recognise a lot of our learners at the Academy in this. That’s why I
always use this analogy.
So with this in mind, Laura and I today really want to help work through those language.
So there are three pillars that you really need to look at. The first one is looking at the different
levels. Let me let me share my screen. So I think Laura wants to share a document. Is that is that OK?
Laura, has that allowed you to yeah.
OK. So number one, let me give you the three pillars and then.
We’ll work through them so number one is looking at the different levels of proficiency when you are
learning a foreign language #2 within those levels is to look at the skills that you want to acquire,
communicate skills, and we’ll look at those later. And #3 is to have that road map that I like to talk
about. 1,2,3 level Skills road map. So if we look at the level language schools across the world, we’ll
have maybe a slightly different opinion on this. But as far as we are concerned, the common
European framework of reference for languages is our Bible. It’s an extremely thorough scheme of
work, so we can look at all the different skills that language learners need to have acquired in order
to be proficient in that language. I think that the different communicating skills and the and the
different steps are very well worked on and structured and outlined. So this is what we will be
working on. So you basically have three different levels, ABC very simple A1 and A2 where you are a
basic user B1 and B2 when you become an independent learner and C1 and C2, this is when you are
reaching fluency. Can I ask you now, Laura, to show us the slightly more detailed version of the CEFR,
please?
Absolutely. So we have received a document from Natalie yesterday by e-mail, which is a very, very
complete guide to this where we have all of the different levels. So A1A2, etcetera, all broken down
into a lot, so broken down into lots and lots of different things that you can really look at what we’re
going to show you today. That’s just kind of the global idea of the levels you can get more of an idea
of what it is.
So if we have a look, so we have the different levels going from A1A2 which are considered basic
levels B1B2 which is where you are more independent and then C1C2 where you are becoming more
proficient to know that C2 is more effective of native speaker ability, which means that C2 is an
extremely good level. Not everybody will get to a C2 level and it’s not necessarily the goal of
everyone to get to the C2 level as well. If your goal really is to get to being a very independent user
where you can get by in lots of situations in French, then a B2 is going to be the kind of area that
you’re looking at C1C2 is very much when you’re working in technical domains in English or in the
language that will be French for you and very, very specific specialised language often. Remember as
a native speaker as well you don’t necessarily know every single word in the language sometimes
when we go to technical domains. We don’t know what you know. You don’t know certain words as
well, you don’t know certain expressions, so we have to remember what we’re looking at there so
the goal firstly is never 100% a 100% doesn’t exist. That’s not something that we can achieve for
language.So let’s have a look then at the different steps. Let’s start to begin with with the basic A1
A2. So as you can see A1 is very much with the breakthrough stage. This is kind of where a lot of
people coming to us they say I’ve done a lot of, maybe a lot of time on the apps, things like that. A1
stage is very simple. You can understand very simple expressions, you can give very simple
expressions. For example, you can go into a cafe in France and you can ask your coffee and you can
do the very routine Thank you merci like that If the server tries to speak to you a little bit more detail
about something else maybe you’re not going to understand, so A1 it’s very much using very basic
interaction. This is kind of where you really can go and you can do very routine tasks. You’ve
practised a lot, but you can’t necessarily speak very much spontaneity. Or you can read very basic
sentences. For example, maybe you can manage dispatch read at a train timetable, things where it’s
very where you can really imagine what it’s going to say. So we can really predict whether the kind of
language is going to hop. So A1 is very not basic. You know, just kind of very simple getting by a two
suddenly is where you can actually start to really string your sentences together.So you’re going to be
able to actually have a little bit more of an interaction, for example with your waiter when you arrive
in the cafe, however, again, it’s going to remain very basic, it’s going to stay around topics that you
are familiar with so very much interactions, things that you can do yourself, things that you can
already predict how the interaction is going to go very routine sequences for example you could
explain a little about yourself, you can do a basic presentation, but again soon as the the then the
interaction goes a little bit off your of your script of what you thought was gonna happen. Maybe you
get a little bit stuck, you are very good at the spontaneity at this point so A1 A2 really are kind of the
basics if your goal is just to be able to go on holiday and order in a restaurant and be able to do the
very basic functional interactions A2 is kind of where you’re going to be. The jump between A2 and
B1 is where things get a little bit bigger.
B1 we’re really starting to get a lot more spontaneity and you’re going to be able to have a lot more
wider vocabulary. This means you’re going to be able to understand a lot more different texts and a
lot more different conversations. So for example we have produced texts which are topics of their
interests. So for example, you could read or you can write texts that are about your hobbies, about
things that are talking to you, maybe about your work. Here is also where we can start to really give
insight as to what we’re thinking. So talking about our opinions, our beliefs, things like that. So B1 is
really where we’re beginning to be able to express ourselves and show our personality a little bit
more really is where we can start to actually become who we are and show who we are in the
language afterwards B1 and then leave it to B2. This really is the level where you are very proficient,
a very intermediate user, meaning that you are able to cope with everyday situations. You can
understand the news when you read it, you can understand different magazines or YouTube videos or
things that are of interest to you, you fully understand TV shows if maybe you need subtitles you
might need to look up every now and then a word. B2 is a very good leve if you would like to go and
study for if, maybe not quite for you, but if someone wants to go and study in another country,
usually they ask for a very sort the top level B2 is where you need to be. So at this point you can get
by in a foreign country. You can talk about things that are of interest to you. You can be a lot more
varied iIn your sentence structure, and you can really get by, as I said, B2 is kind of the level where a
lot of people will be expecting to or other people want to get because it means that you can be
independent in your language skills. You can cope with situations that maybe you weren’t necessarily
prepared for. So for example, if you have the, if your car breaks down and you need to call somebody,
or if you have to make a doctor’s appointment, you might expect something like once we pass the B2
level and we get to C1 C2 this is very, very good, good high level. This means that you are very, very
proficient user. It means that you are able to cope with technical situations as well. As an example
you have to cope with academic studies and the language you’ll be able to cope with business
studies in the language or working in a company or something like that. So once we get to the C1, it’s
very very much not exactly native, perhaps there will still be a few little, so if it’s not very native like
expressions in the language or terms of phrases, however, you are going to be at a very, very good
level. So between B2 and C1 I just want to stress that it’s quite a difference between the two and it’s
not necessarily in.everyone’s objectives to get to a C1, and that’s OK because you can do very, very
well in the language without being at C1 level. So this is kind of where I really suggest you take time
to look at the common European framework reference as well and really see if there are any of the
skills which nationals come to in a minute of that level that you want to get to once we get to see
two, this is this is quite rare, I would say in foreign language acquisition. If you are learning from an
adult stage, C2 means that you are effectively at a need to speak like oh, you can understand things
just as well as the need to speak up just about and you can do everything that you would like to do in
language. Obviously there’s that we’re always always learning more. So I don’t really think of C2 as
like 100% as I said because that isn’t something that is realistic for languages because we’re always
adding more and more, but these are kind of the guidelines, the stages that we can go through when
we’re looking at our language development. So as I said it is also really important to think about
where you want to be as well as where you are now, leave it that can actually to to go through a bit
more.
Thank you very much, Laura. So I’m not particularly efficient with zoom, so I think that if I do that
you’ll be able to share another document there with me, which would be here. Can anyone can
everyone see this?
OK, so I really want to touch up on what Laura said. Breaching a C1 or C2 level, whilst it is incredible,
and if that’s really what you want, I will 100% encourage you to do it, don’t think that this is the be all
and handle OK. It is an extremely challenging result to achieve and it’s not always necessary. OK, we
have trained some of our students at that level. I’m thinking of a gentleman in particular who was
Irish, lived here in the UK and worked in the Pharmaceutical industry. He was the European head of
supply chain and he was getting a job in Paris. He needed to have at least a C1 level and that included
an awful lot of technical stuff, which was obviously down to the industry that it was in, but what I
want to say is that.
If you are looking to get by and feel comfortable in your skin when you are speaking French, knowing
that you’re not completely proficient, knowing that you’re not completely independent, but actually
there isn’t anywhere in an everyday situation that where you can be without pulling something out
of the hat if something is to happen to you, that would be a level 80 for example. Of course, if you
want to work in a French company, as as Laura said, if you wanna apply for university then you need
to look at more of a B1 B2. Most European countries used to ask for B2 level to take the nationality
test. It’s gone down to B1 now for most of them. And I would say that the main difference between
B1 and B2 is one is more technical so B1 means that you master all the different tenses and all the
grammar very well. B2 means that you understand it can utilise it, but in a more complex way you are
able to make sentences which are not only correct grammatically, and all your verbs are spot on. But
you are expressing yourself with a lot with a, with a huge variety of sentence structure and
vocabulary, that’s the difference between the two so it would be really interesting for you to take a
moment and for now, because it can change, decide the ideal level that you would like to reach as
you either embark on your French language journey or continue along that journey.
So the next thing that we want to talk to you about are the skills that you need to acquire within
those level. So when you look at learning a foreign language, we like to focus on five different skills.
Spoken production and spoken interaction. I’d very much like to emphasise on the last two because
as a general rule, most traditional courses you hear that it’s about speaking well. There’s a real
difference between spoken production and spoken interaction when you have to speak to someone
and explain something in a casual conversation or because you need help or advice.This is spoken
production.
How well can you express yourself when you start to interact with someone and have a two or three
or 10 way conversation?
This is spoken interaction, and obviously that requires slightly different skills. OK, so another thing
that I would really like you to think about is say, OK, so listening, reading, writing, spoken,
production, spoken interaction. Which skill would I ideally lLike to focus on because you know, when
you learn a foreign language, all the skills are going to be involved all of them but you can decide to
focus on certain skills if you want to narrow your studies. So you could say well, I tell you what,
communication oral communication for me is going to be a huge factor. So I may just focus on
listening, spoken production, spoken interaction, you may think, well, actually you know, I’ve been
practising French for a while. I go to France all the time I live in France, for me, this is kind of OK. I
want to take an exam, so I’m going to have to focus on the reading and writing skills.
This guys is going to be really quite important when you decide to set up your language skills. The
more focused you are on the skills that you want to focus on, the more you’re going to progress
because let me tell you once you’ve started to be comfortable with certain skills the other ones will
kind of flow in naturally. This can sound a little bit you know of a of a simplified version, but I can
guarantee that once you focus on certain skill suit, for example, you knew yesterday some of you
asked questions about bilingual children. Bilingual children will acquire all these skills naturally apart
from one writing writing. They will need to learn but the truth is that it will be much easier for them
to learn it than other children who have not been exposed to the language reading, isn’t it quite
magical that that comes naturally to them sometimes they may stumble across a few words because
the pronunciation might be a little complex, but generally that comes naturally to them, so do you
try and focus on the skills that you think are gonna be most useful to you to start with, and that will
definitely motivate you to imagine the the, the scenarios, the situation that you are going to be in
when you next speak French and decide the skills that are important to you.
The reason why this booklet that we’ve shared with you is like a little Bible. It’s our little Bible. Now,
this is not something that you have to learn by heart. This is not something that you have to use
every day but ideally I’d love for this to be your companion, your learning companion then,
throughout your French cities, it is something that you should always have with you is something
that you can always go back to
It’s something that is really going to help you to structure your learning and motivate you as well
because you can put a name on what you’ve achieved and just a quick word as well before I’ll show
you the booklet and explaining to you and ask you do a little bit of work on it in my opinion and in all
my years of of of more my 20 years of teaching French. What I have found is that people stop
learning when they don’t feel they are progressing or they’re not sure where they’re going. They may
start to feel a little bit more comfortable with the language, but they’re not really sure where they’re
at, where they’re going. And I think that’s why going back to a little booklet like that, which I think is
quite easy to use, can make a real difference.It’s important for you. Remember we we keep talking
about it. It is a journey. Ideally you want to adopt learning French and speaking French as something
that will be just be part of your life style to going back to something and kind of checking regularly is
going to make a difference for you. So when you look at this booklet, it will go towards each skill. So
for example here we have listening and then we have the different levels that Laura talked about
earlier, A1 level, A2 level, so listening basic level A1 entry level. I can understand basic greetings and
use phrases such as hello, good morning. Excuse me. Sorry and thank you. Are you working towards
it? Have you achieved it now?
When you feel that perhaps you’ve achieved all of that, lots of little ticks in the boxes, you can go.
OK, so where is my next step? I can understand simple phrases, questions and information relating to
basic personal needs such as shopping, eating out, going to doctors. What’s great about this little
booklet is that it can not only motivate you to tick the boxes and tell yourself that you’ve done it, but
it also clearly shows you where your next step should be, and that’s the bit that’s important when
you learn a foreign language. It is rather disheartening to keep learning without really understanding
where you’re at.
So that will help you but you may also not be really sure what the next step should be and that will
help you, because professionals are telling you you don’t have to second guess that professionals are
telling you that if you can now do I can understand short simple instructions and directions given in
classless speech. You know that the next step is I can understand basic information about people,
their family, homework and hobbies. Great. Let me work on this. That is why, to me, this little booklet
should truly be your learning companion. We also use it a lot with people who are fairly proficient in
French, they come to us and say I think I know a lot, but I need you to help me analyse what I know
and where I should go. That’s our first port of call for our little booklet. You see? So here we’re in the
listening and then you go to B1B2. So if you read the booklet, you’ll see how you’re going upper level,
upper level, upper level, small steps, but ideal to show you the progression that you should work
towards and by the way guys, it doesn’t mean that you. have to do all of them. OK, if it says for
example when you get to like B1B2 level in things such as proper spoken production, it will say things
like you should be able to do an entire presentation in French to an audience at work in a topic that’s
kind of related to your industry, you may look at that and go Idon’t want to work with friends, this is
not for me, great. You can use it or interpret it in a different way it could be about describing what
your work was like it could be describing what your holidays have been. You know it it. It doesn’t
have to be professional. What that booklet is showing you is the situation in which you will be and
the skills that you will need to have acquired. So all of it is a description of every single skill, so the
five skills that we’ve spoken about and all the different levels. What I would love for you to do now is
do your own personal homework on it and first of all, would you be keen to share what skills you
would ideally like to focus on reading, writing, listening, spoken production or interaction.Whether
you are experienced at learning and speaking French or you are very new to it. Do you have skills that
you feel will be more useful to you in the short term, to start with just checking them.
Anyone wants to share?
Lynn wants to take an exam. Am I right, Lynn? To think that you wanna obtain the French nationality,
is that right? Yeah. OK, so indeed in order to do the test then there are certain skills that you need to
work on which could be completely different to someone who just wants to go out and live in France
without taking the exam. So for that you need two things. You need to use the booklet, but also you
need to look at the exam requirements. I don’t think it is that complicated, but you do need a solid
B1. We have a student who’s just done it and she said that it was much easier than she expected it to
be in most skills in most skills, but she said that the fact that it was easier than she thought it was
going to be kind of through her a little bit she pushed herself to a B2 she’s been studying here really
hard and then thought. Ohh it’s easier and I thought. But yeah B1 a good B1 level. No, it’s definitely
not so bad. So Usha, I love it. So you wanna reach B2 and so spoken production and interaction are
right for you. I would definitely having spoken to you personally, I would definitely agree on that. You
know you want to interact with your son’s family, with your being able to understand your
granddaughter because she’ll be brought to bilingually spoken production and interaction are
absolutely gonna be key for you and absolutely amazing if you wanna reach a B2 level because that is
some level. So well done. So Lynn, you said look at your booklet, I feel I’m a low level B1, OK. This is
something that I was going to cover later but whilst we’re on that topic, let’s talk about it now. Lynn,
have you ever actually done a formal test to find out what I think you should? We can actually help
you with that. We’ve run online tests that our students can do so we do two things. We do
consultations and informal learning assessments with our students where we use this booklet. So it’s
a guide of where we feel there may be, but then we put them through an online test which lasts
about 25 minutes and you answer a series of questions, and then it tells you exactly at the end where
you’re at and it’s really, really quite good as well. We don’t, we don’t mark that test by the way we
want it to be impartial so it’s done by a company in France, we partner with. You might want to, you
might want to do that. You might want to do that.
The Chloe test? Yeah, we know the Chloe test. We do CPF as well.
Let us know what you let us know what you get with the Chloe test, but it will be really interesting.
Take the result limb with a little bit of a pinch of salt this is the Chloe test or the pipelet test which we
use are all an indication of your overall language skills the test for French nationality is slightly, and
that’s why I think that when you are working towards an exam, you should work with someone who
knows that exam.
Doing the level test and doing the analysis and looking at the booklet should be the groundwork, and
then the programme that you do should be based on what the exam requirements actually are,
because as we all know, there’s a huge difference between speaking a foreign language and actually
passing a language exam. So she said. I’m so pleased I’m not doing this for test examination. I really
want to have fun. Yeah, absolutely. You know absolutely. And so for you, you see that’s the thing that
that’s a really good point cause today we’re talking about language goals and for you Usha, it’s like
there’s no pressure you do what you want, how you want it. But the reason why I think what we’ve
spoken about today will be relevant to you is just so you keep on track because when there isn’t, I
mean you have a great reason with your granddaughter for for wanting to do it but a lot of people,
when there isn’t, you know, a huge carrot at the end or something. They absolutely have to do such
as lean and French nationality. You know, there’s no two ways around it. You want French nationality,
you have to take the exam As for you Sir, like you could just have six months of lesson and go well,
you know, I know enough for my pushing. You know, the pushchair. I’ll be OK. And that’s why I think
that all we spoken about today is great because it should be a really good motivating factor for you.
So what I see I wanted to show you. Let me show you this as well, let’s see here. See, this is one of
our customers language programme. So once we once she’s hired some of our students, have a
one-on-one consultation when we do an informal but thorough analysis with one of our language
coaches to figure out where this person is, where this person wants to go, and then we give really
good guidance on what should happen in the language programme. Other students decide. On top of
that to have an online a slightly more formal assessment. Then we put a language programme
together such as this one and that’s what I mean by road map. And this happens whether people
learn with us in groups or one-on-one.
So once all of this has been analysed, you can decide on the linguistic objective of the student. OK, so
you. See this lady, she wants to focus on listening skills, reading skills, spoken production.
Here it’s a lovely lady called Liz. She has had a counters with the French language before. Several
times she I think she did a course years and years ago. She’s gone to France a little bit. She learned a
little bit at school, but now she’s decided that this is something that she’s really going to do. So we’ve
done a consultation with her. We didn’t feel that she needed to do the task because her knowledge
was too basic and so we looked at the booklet and worked on this and asked her the skills she
wanted to work on then we put that language programme together. So this is again something that
we do with students, whether they learn one to one or groups. So as you can see, she talked about
listening, reading, spoken production and writing skills you will note that there’s no spoken
interaction here. That’s because she said I’m not really going to and like this is a six month
programme and she said for the next six months, you know, I’m not really going to be interacting
with anyone. I really want you to give me a solid grounding on all the other skills. So we’ve listed the
things that we believe she should focus on now per skill. Give examples. OK, then we look at the
topics that we are going to cover with her and then how we are going to formally largely informally
assess her throughout the next six months. That’s what our little VICI road map looks like. Yours
could be different. It depends how you like to work, but this is how we organise the programmes for
our students. What’s great about this is, you know, what you’re going to learn you know the topic
that we’re going to cover, but it isn’t a really heavy and detailed document that you’re likely to ever
read or where you get a little lost. It’s condensed, it’s compact, but it’s got all the right information so
you know exactly where you are going and what you’ll be studying in the next six months.
Does that make sense?
What I wanted to say is on Sunday, which I believe is I’m just checking day 7. Sunday is going to be
very much a session based on what we call the customised learning assessment. So we are basically
going to have a hot seat you are very welcome to join us and lie. Tell us where you are, where you
want to be, and we’ll just talk about you. You won’t leave for 5-10 minutes depending on how many
people are asking, and you’ll be on the hot seat, and we will try as much as we can in the short space
of time we have to tell you exactly what you should focus on to tell you, you know, we’ll go back to
everything that we will have covered this week, the personality and colour, the type of learner that
you are.
Everything OK? All the different resources that you need to put in your bland and then we will look at
examples of language programmes like that. So this is happening on Sunday. By the way, which gives
you actually Wednesday today’s next, which gives you time to go over that little booklet you could
have very general questions such as I’m here. I want to go there. Or do you think I should do or you
should say I decided that I want to focus on that area. What resources do you think I should use? I
am this type of learner?What do you think I should do? What resources should I use? Does that
make sense? And do you have any questions on the three pillars, IE the levels, the skills within those
levels and the road map? I’m just checking on questions.
As I said, I think it’s important to stress what Natalie and I have said that again, the goal isn’t to get to
100% of language. It isn’t to get necessary to see two level so I see that both Lynn and usually have
really thought already about what you would like to achieve, obviously lines were different. We
should have the exam and you should like what am I pronouncing your name right?
Yes, you should get excellent. You should.
Well, Sir, I see you’ve said a long time you want to get to the two level, which is great.
Like, really ambitious. I love it. But I think it’s important to always while you have the idea of what
you want to get to, it’s very important to be looking at the booklet and thinking about what you need
to do next as well. So rather than, you know it’s good to have some high I Love, I’m a very visual
learner so I have my booklet. I’m using the Spanish one as well, so I highlight really where I am at the
moment you know, then I go through I highlight where I want to be. But in between that it’s very
important to know the next steps to take and to not you know otherwise you get a little bit
overwhelmed it can be a lot, so it’s really important to sort of look at the specific steps that you need
to be taking next whether that’s with guidance from an expert such as us or on your own, but yeah,
just to make sure that do you know, like Nancy said, with her mountain, you don’t just see the top of
the mountain. You need to know which path you’re gonna take before you get there as well.
So just to be aware of that to make sure, you really are looking in the detail as well, and I love that
Lynn says that UshA, you’re just reminded, Lynn, that she’ll potentially have to speak to
grandchildren as the one I hope you do.
Yeah, that’s very true. Excellent. Ohh, timeline of that tenses.
Do you mean in terms of when you use?
What terms and when?
Yeah, for my students, I find that they react really well when they can visualise it on a timeline.
Now the past, the future and the tense is being used with the little lines and the things for
continuous etcetera. I have searched high and low for one in French and I cannot find one and I need
one.
Well, let me I don’t have one myself. Definitely something we can.
Isn’t that interesting? Not being a visual learner, that doesn’t speak to me very well.
Love the idea. OK. And but I know exactly what you mean, cause I remember learning English at
school and the teacher was using one. If I’ll, I’ll ask the team we’ve got, I’ve got tonnes of French
resources everywhere, but I’ll ask the team and I just want to say that what Laura said is really great.
It’s amazing to set yourself a high target. What’s also brilliant is to have steps and tick and say I’ve
achieved this. I’ve achieved this, I’ve achieved that not only you know where you’re going, but it
keeps you motivated as well and you need to celebrate, by the way, is you allowed to go to a French
restaurant and have an expensive bit of red wine or any other wine.
Every time that you reach that step, but I just to me, those 3 pillars like level skills and road map are
really crucial to help you navigate around your French learning without getting lost, because if you
get lost, undoubtedly you lose the motivation I’ll tell you what I I wanted. I’m just checking the time,
if that’s OK with you, I’ll let you have a little chat and I’m going to see if my colleague Cecile is
available to have a chat with you because I was chatting to her about our session today. She said
something that I thought was hugely relevant about her past experience of working in a different
company where it was very much about the entertainment element of learning the foreign language
and how she felt things were different when she came here and we still wanted our students to have
a great time, but we put real structure into their learning she said to me, if you’ve got a few minutes
left, I’d love to come and chat to your participant about it. So what I’m going to do, if that’s OK, I’m
going to stop the shares. You should all see each other and I’m just going to go and see if she’s
available for a minute. Bear with me.
I want to introduce you to Cecile. Cecile’s, one of our French coaches. So I’ve just told our lovely
participants to today’s French master class. We talked about, as you know, you know levels and and
skills and road maps and we showed language programmes and we showed the booklet to the
European framework for languages and I said that I mentioned to you yesterday, what we were
gonna talk about and you came up with this great idea of the difference between the comedy you
worked out before, where it was all about the entertainment element of learning the foreign
language and then you came here, where we still want people to have a great time, but we’re pretty
kind of needs to be structured needs to be like that, need to understand this data and I said that you
had like great insights on this, which I felt would be really useful to share.
Hello. My name is Cecile. I have lived in the UK for quite some time and now I will sell the exact
number and I was this ready to become a teacher, when I was very young. And therefore, when the
business route I had a career stopped my career to have my son and eventually always the
background was always teaching languages. So I worked and experienced various settings as well as
various methods. In other words, I’ve worked in schools, I’ve had a licence of of a very formatted
methodology and you know all methods are always approaches to language and teaching and
journeys. Had they pose an account. But what I love Vicki, is that we do structure. Yeah. Fun
structure. Yeah. Spontaneity. It’s all about creativity and also it’s an exchange. Languages are about
exchanging, so it has got to work for the person receiving that information and and the teacher. So
this is where I think the key allows us to be. You know, use a very elaborate way of teaching
languages which the European framework does, and it gives us great landmarks, but we can also, you
know, have great fun and also the other thing that I particularly like is the fact that we can tailor our
programmes to suit each of our learners and the way they learn their learning style and this is very
new because normally you know you have a methodology and that methodology is just applied like a
blanket whereas here we use some methodology but we also take into consideration who it is we are
teaching and how they like to learn best. And I can’t express it. I just love it so much because because
it is the only way really to learn and have experience. The other methodologies, I mean a very strict
rigid structure tends to end up in. Yeah. So following a like a curriculum as in the school can be great,
but eventually it might be too rigid and lead to demotivation and equally having a lot of fun or being
less structured means that at some point you might not feel that you’re progressing and therefore
we have to have a bit of both in order to to be successful and in my opinion this is where which is so
successful at supporting our clients language journeys and and yes I think that’s about it.
Thank you. Thank you. I think it it really sums it up, you know. There are loads of methodologies out
there, and people who pretend to have found the magic pill for you to learn a foreign language are
liars for one of a better word. However, there is a way of looking at, you know, this student as a
whole, and we talk about being student centred and that’s why, you know you talked about looking
at, you know, the personalization of the programme, that was a huge part of what we covered in day
one and day two and obviously today we talked about the entire path to make sure that what you do
is motivating is structured, is planned, that you don’t lose your way whilst learning and so you are
always engaged with you know the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, but also you’re
engaged. But you’re also very satisfied about where you are because you feel you’re making
progress.
Thank you, Cecile. OK.
Thanks, Lynn. That’s very kind of you. It is spot on one o’clock here in the UK, so that is the end of
day three. Master class happy to stay a little bit longer if you have any questions at all. All good.?
OK. Well, we will see you tomorrow and tomorrow I will be presenting with my colleague Lana.
Tomorrow. It will be about ways of living the language.
So I very much look forward to seeing you then and thank you for being here today, merci.
Thank you. This is very interesting. Thank you.
You’re very welcome.

So for those of you who are new to the master class today, my name is Natalie and I’m the director here at the VICI Academy. I ran this nice nine day French master class together with my colleague
Laura, who is a French and English coach. She also happens to be the manager of our French office
and today for this session only Lana, who is also one of our longstanding language coaches, will be
joining me, and we’ll actually run most of the session. So we’ve been organising and we’ve been
running this master class for four days now. It is a nine day master class now it is a French
masterclass simply because this is my language of predilection. However, I have said from day one
that this truly is a master class that any language, learner or lover can attend, because we’re
actually going through language learning strategies rather than speaking about the language in
particular, we’ll do that a bit later on and towards the end of course.
So on day one, we looked at just a quick recap on day one, we looked at 2 strategies to tricking your
brain into learning the language. So we looked at your personality in colours. That was a really fun
exercise to do. Then we look at the type of learner. That you are to really help you understand how
you will best absorb and memorise and retain and use and analyse the language that you are
learning. On day two, we looked at the concept of blended learning and how amazing this is to
really make your language learning journey exciting, varied, but also pretty efficient. And then
yesterday we looked at a plan. Yesterday we showed you a blueprint on how to plan your language
goals, regardless of where you are starting at and regardless of where you want to go to and today,
we are kicking off with a session called five ways to live your language. So what does that mean?
Well, we’ve gone through strategies. We’ve gone through planning and all of this has to be
meaningful but fun and we think that your language also needs to be part of your routine. But
when it’s part of your routine, it kind of needs to be effortless you don’t want it to be a burden.
OK, we’ve given you the big, solid groundings, the big pillars with the strategies with the planning
then to build a routine around your language studies is something that you can do that you ought
to do that really encourage you to do but this can be done with a lot of fun. However, if it’s not
something that you’ve done before, you may wonder how it’s possible to do it, and that is why
we’re here today. Now the first thing that I want to do is I said to my team when I was preparing
for this master class, the content of this master class, I said to my team we have a private Facebook
group just for the team of language coaches and so I put a post saying if I said to you tell me ways
to live the foreign language that I’m learning what would you say? And I’d really like to share with
you just casually what they have said, because I actually think that it is quite meaningful. So let me
I thought I had facebook open, but I don’t, but that’s OK. Let me open Facebook and let me show
you so groups. It’s a little bit slow today. Oh, there, we. Go and there we are. OK, so let’s see. OK,
there it is. That’s me. That was me telling everyone not to knock on my door every day for 9 days
between 12:00 and 1:00 because I’m wearing my master class. So, there it is I said if I ask you to
lose weight, to list a foreign language, I have it you can bring into your daily life to help your
learning. What would you say? Quite interesting. So let’s have a quick comments.
Just we can’t see Facebook. Oh. You can’t see my Facebook page. Ohh. I did say to deny that I
wasn’t very good with. I think I know with. See there it is there. It is. How about now? Yeah. So this
is our team here, and this was the question that I asked everyone and I whilst I was preparing for
the content and I thought I’d love to see what people have to say. So this is quite interesting guys,
because these are really spontaneous answers. You know, when you reply on Facebook, you don’t
give it too much thoughts, very spontaneous from our team within our private group. So this was
not really for students to see, but I found the answers were really interesting, so I wanted to show
you well, we’re gonna put Lana to the side because Lana’s who one of our main presenter today,
Maria said fall in love with something or someone. That’s a really good advice. Then, Latifa said,
watch movies in Netflix in their original language or without subtitle, keep chatting with friends
and I have that target language being part of a club group, for example on social media, cause I
think she loves that. Alice says I agree with falling in love with the place or friend or person, friends
or otherwise. That’s a good idea. Forcing yourself to communicate in the words and where you
know, putting yourself in a new situation where you have to listen and speak to the people. I
particularly love that one. One of our old students actually, really love sewing so she found a
sewing club when she moved to France and said that she spent hours there. Just listening to what
was happening, because when she moved out there, her language was very basic. So that’s a very
good idea. Just sit there, listen, observe. Joe said I’m a big advocate for Academy English versus
slang, more likely to encounter slang in spoken English outside the class so cringe because I’m not
a fan. Watch soaps and reality TV, the downside is doesn’t portray English people at their best.
Love this example because I often say that 20 years ago when I moved to the UK I didn’t know was
soap operas, were it wasn’t a thing in France at the time and I lived in Manchester. So for those of
you who are UK based, who understand what I’m talking about, I started watching Coronation
Street and it was completely alien to me. But it was everyday life. People who looked like me and
who had a real Mancunian accent. So I sat there with a cup of tea every day for about half an hour
and I did actually, learn quite a lot of English from it. So I just wanted to share that with you
because I thought that that was quite interesting to see what the team was saying. And I think that
the idea here falling in love with someone with, you know, with something, with watching movies,
with joining a club face to face or a group on Facebook. This is really what we want to talk to you
about today. But we want to give it a little bit more depth to what we’re going to do is Lana is now
going to be our main presenter. She’s going to tell you a little bit about her background, which I
think is very interesting, her experience with foreign languages which is absolutely, extremely rich
and phenomenal. And then she will give you her insight based on this as to what you can do if you
have any questions on the BBC article that we have sent to you yesterday and that we’ve added to
our Facebook group because we thought it was very relevant to today’s topic, then please ask
questions at the end either to Lana or myself or Laura, and then I’ll take over after Lana and I will
put a little bit of structure into all of this. We promised five ways to live your language, so at the
end of Lana’s presentation and any of your potential questions, then I will go through the five if
you like different sections that we identified, does that make sense? Yeah. OK. Right, Lana, ready to
take over? Ohh we could. Ohh there we go. There you are. Yeah. Lovely.
Happy to hear. You can hear me. Great. Hi, everyone. And I’m happy to be here and actually
honoured to be here and talk about the topic, which I feel very passionate about and yeah, so it’s a
great privilege for me to be talking with you and share my experiences. So basically, as I mentioned
on Facebook, if you read the the post of like from yesterday I mentioned that I was born in a
completely multilingual multicultural environment. So I am originally from Russia and I was born in
1986, so it was still the Soviet Union, you know, with all this, with consequences, political, cultural
consequences, where there was still, like, the wall was like kind of flowing already when I was
growing up, like the growing I mean, in the communist world, but still the world stayed in a lot of
people’s minds you know, and in my family it’s just it was just me now it’s just me now who has a
passport like passport to travel to other countries. So growing up, so we’re just small language in
my family. We never travelled abroad, we never spoke other languages, we’ve never been
discussed other countries you know, so I’m saying that to show you that it is possible to become
multilingual or bilingual as an adult because I learned basically I have learned in my life several
languages, not to brag, but yeah, just the total simple language that I learned in my life foreign
languages, but I learned them most of them but in my adulthood, as an adult, not as a kid. So
when I was very young, nobody talked to me in any language or nobody you know, I never had,
like, foreign friends coming to visit or whatever. So it was really like completely again monolingual
but I was very drawn actually I was magnetised I don’t know if this word exists with English,
because although with our Soviet country and like, there was no really much maybe interest in
foreign relationship with Western countries. We still had English classes and of course in the 90s
the English music, the British music, the American movies started to, you know, come and I was
completely fascinated with the sound of that language, both British and American accents. And
to the point where I would be like listening to Spice Girls like completely not understanding what
they were you know, thinking about. But having like really, really fun and enjoying myself or
sometimes like would be repeating some you know, some lines from the movies or some, you
know, explanations that they produced, you know, like movies and they say typically oh my God.
Ohh, and I used to kind of unconsciously repeat that after them and I imagine. That I kind of
could speak sort of that language. Yeah, that was as a child I was kind of finding my way because
there wasn’t there were no resources really in the 90s. There was no Internet anywhere, right?
Like my English teacher was not really good at written language example the lessons were really
read and translate, so there was no speaking, no one know any kind of human touch, but in
which actually what happened was that a lot of my classmates, they developed resentment
towards English and they hate it, they absolutely didn’t like it. And then of course this is what I
actually come across now, as sometimes as a training language training coach that people come
to me and they still feel that resentment because as a child in their childhood they have really
bad experience with their language studies language lessons but that wasn’t my case,
fortunately. Unfortunately, even though like yeah, it was well, boring I still, like, loved English and
in the back of my mind probably I hope that one day I will pursue that. I mean, what I didn’t
know what I was going to pursue the other, I studied I moved on to study linguistics. Naturally,
well, maybe not naturally but that doesn’t mean that’s how the last time to speak. All this
language, it’s no way and so at university, my language classes were much better, I mean English
classes were much better, more, a little bit more conversation, but still, a lot of grammar, a lot of
reading a lot of you know, translation to and that to the point where I came to the states after
four years of university, four years of university and in total, I think that that was 13 years of
studying English I came to the USA as an exchange student to work at Dunkin’ Donuts as a you
know crew member and my first days were absolutely like on on another planet. I kept like
asking myself, is this really the language I had been studying for 13 years? I couldn’t really
believe it. I couldn’t understand people you know and at that point, this is where I really started.
To be like aware like of the you know, deficiencies of language, education system, traditional
language, education system because here I was, I took like I took classes for 15 years and I
couldn’t speak I couldn’t function in the language. That was really persuading and I think I keep,
like kind of carrying on this, maybe personal frustration and kind of implementing that in my
lessons, I mean not for switching, but I mean I’m trying to kind of teach my learners how to use
the language, not just to learn all the rules and filling, the gaps and blah blah blah, but also use
so that they feel comfortable in real life, and this is something that, for example, have been able
to implement and I have seen really great results where people not just learn language but also
like use it like as a function, yeah for example to buy an ice cream or I don’t know make a speech
on LinkedIn whatever it is. So yeah, basically what I also wanted to add to my experiences and
then we can I will move on to some kind of more specific examples of living the language, right I
as a student I sometimes because it was the beginning of 2000s, you know, the Internet was still
kind of fundamental, but I hadn’t like a tremendous curiosity about the world around me, and I
would be, you know, looking for pen pals from different countries, you know, to get to know
people from different countries again for English. But you can also do that for French. Because
French is also spoken in so many countries, right? So French also gives you like really solid key to
the world out there and then I even made some friends some real friends that I met like face to
face after exchanging several emails over, I don’t know, several months maybe or so. And that
was all of those things they were really like starting to kind of feed my my passion and also my
my interest towards languages and also I joined Post Crossing project which I’m I’m still a part of.
It’s basically you sent a real written postcard to a random person around the world and then also
you get also a postcard a random postcard from a random person in the world so this Is really
fantastic and so then coming back, they’re coming back, moving on a little bit to some specific
examples here because here today we’re talking about living the language and some of the
things that I do for example, I make a shopping list in that and these are that for language and so
this way, even if you for example you don’t know how this particular item is called in, for
example, French in this case of course, you can always look it up and just put it in your list or you
can write it down and then include an emoji or a picture to help you to understand yeah,
because visual cues they are always helpful and then I also what I also do is that I use the
Internet to kind of fuel my curiosity we all know that Internet is a minefield it’s it can be a
blessing, it can be a curse to both, but that’s actually so yeah, you have to be careful about what
you consume on the Internet. But my point it’s it’s something that a lot of people and coaches
also trainers, whatever, say that watch movies and you’ll read articles or listen to programmes,
watch BBC, we’ll talk about or some other channels and I agree with that, but for me, the main
point is that you have to be really interested in what you are watching, so let’s do watching or
listening or reading OK, let’s do a little just a little quick exercise. Can you write down in the chat
3 topics that you love or when you really like talking about just 3 topics from the top of your hat.
Embroidery crochet reading, great gardening, cooking, travel, books, music, food. Awesome. Any
other topics?
Tai chi. Wow. That’s cool. Theatre. Yeah, I like. This is such a variety of topics. That’s really cool.
Great, sports, all of them. Why reading? Wow seems like reading is reading it’s writing leading
reading, yeah. Yeah, all of film, French culture. Bogan, English. French, Spanish. And Dutch every
week. Wow, that’s oh, my God. That’s also ordinary cooking above all, alright. Great. So right, so
you’ve written this 3 topics and the idea is to find quality content on the topics that you really like,
OK and of course, if we’re talking about French here mainly, that should be in French. OK. Of
course, in case your language level allows you to do that and I think if you have your basics cover,
like if you at least have a 2 like. You know, aiming to be B2/B1 this is where you can really start to
you know original authentic context content, yeah. So basically you can think of, you know,
podcasts again we will repeat, but still what you can do what I always advised to my clients. You
just go to any podcast app or you just go to Google and you say for example so here we say we
have a very good example, Tai Chi. So you, you you type Tai Chi probably I don’t know what is Tai
Chi in French? Is it the same?
Same yeah. So it’s going to. Be the same word and then you can put something like the name of
French in French.
In French, then. Though so that it can filter out better you know the results. And then from the
results that you were given, you start to like you see, the titles of course you can start to filter out
the things that speak to you, not because you see Tai Chi. OK, I need to consume it now because
maybe I don’t know they talk about 5 things to prevent injuries. When you do tai chi and this is
something that you were really interested about, OK? You go ahead, you click and you listen. To
that you know or if they talk about why tai chi’s so great for you and you already know that. So
maybe you can skip that so you keep looking and also you keep discovering more content. It can
be podcast, YouTube, blogs, social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, you know, all this Facebook,
whatever it is, but also not only do you need to, you know, consume like, listen, read and watch,
but they did also if you really want to you know kind of see your progress in the language. That it is
to produce like the language, and by produce I mean speaking and writing, OK. So what you’re
going to do is basically going to leave a comment to a post, yeah, if if it’s a post, you’re going to
send in a question because a lot of bloggers, a lot of I don’t know people who who post content
out there they they welcome to really send in their questions so you don’t have to be shy, send in
your question even if it’s going to be with the help of google Translate or dictionary. It doesn’t
matter what matters most is that you really have to like the this, this this channel or this post or
this you know account and you really have to be sort of like a fan so that you have this motivation
to follow and that will organically make you learn the language the language will come to you so
this is the idea and or for example if you feel shy because that’s what I understand and just an
example, I wanted to talk about with my one of my clients, she works at IT and she’s sort of like,
introverted and so she’s not really like, very outspoken and you know very supportive person. So
she she she still feels sometimes kind of intimidating by intimidated by sharing things online. But I
told her that you don’t have to really, like, write long essays. You don’t have to so, you know,
produce perfect things compositions. You can start with just a simple, you know comment like
great article. Thanks. You know or better yet, you can use the phrases or the words from that
article or podcast again, or whatever in your comments. So I don’t know, I’m sorry, my French is
just it’s non existent, but if we’re talking for example English and I don’t know so Imagine that
learner is reading a comment an article about IT education for kids, and and there she finds an
example of a word of a phrase I don’t know IT education it’s a really good example, but it and so
she can think of her question, maybe how to use that example, yeah, IT education or in in her
comment or her question or reply, yeah if it’s a comment to another comment, yeah. So this is
something that we have been doing with her several times I just first told her OK. First I told her
OK, so you’re going to go there is an online debate platform, which is called Kia Law. And I just
checked it, it has the French version, but I think all the debates are in English. I can write you the
the website so that you can check, and what’s great about this platform that it’s completely ad
free, there are no pop ups. There’s like, it’s not social media, it’s just the Today platform and so I
started with that, I told her, look, it’s OK you don’t have to produce perfect text. Let’s start with
something simple. You choose a topic that you like and she liked the topic. She chose IT education
for kids again, as early as three years old because she has to two boys and she works at IT, so this
was a blend for her and I told her just leave one comment start with one comment. And it can be
as short as you get as as you want, OK. And then next time I told her, OK leave the next comment,
leave a little bit bigger comment. OK, so we’re just increasing a little bit the output step by step,
but again, it’s just in the end, it’s about making this habit of. Using the language because. A lot of
times, yeah. When we don’t live in the country where the language is spoken, we think like I don’t
have anywhere to use the language, right? And this is really it’s true, but it’s not really true and
nowadays, thankfully, there are platforms, quality platforms and really content that you can find
and you can engage with you can learn you can feel like a part of the community. It’s just a matter
of pursuing your interests and the patients, but also critical thinking. Yeah, that’s very important.
OK. And another example I wanted to give like using the content is that I had an entrepreneur
French interpreter. He had his own agency, I think was broke or State agency. And so I found for
him really like, interesting a YouTube video how to make LinkedIn work for you, because as an
entrepreneur, you know he needed to, you know, introduce himself to networking and LinkedIn.
He mentioned before that he used LinkedIn so I thought that he could really use LinkedIn to his
benefit to expand his networking, and he watched the video. And then I asked him, OK, So what
would you be? What would be your 3 takeaways? What do you take away from this video? OK,
what are the things so you can start following implementing From that video? OK. And that was
something that really worked for him. Another example that I can tell you how it’s a personal
example. So for example. Or examples. I’m sorry I repeat myself. On some occasions I had
interviews in my other foreign languages for some projects in Spanish and Swedish, and there were
specialised kind of projects or short term gigs, whatever and they’re not in the strongest languages,
to be honest, Spanish with it so of course, it was terrified. It was like what am I gonna do?
But I took it as a challenge and what I did was that I looked up in order to, you know like brush up
on my specific vocabulary as I was looking for some kind of specific words or phrases instead of like
going to Google Translate or dictionary and translating. I went on to the specialised websites with
similar profiles and and and looked up specific words from the same field that I was looking for qnd
I wrote them down so in the end I had all the vocabulary that I needed and that was organic,
natural and that was something that, like the interviewer, could, you know, understand what it was
saying. Yeah. Even though that my I was not very confident in this languages, but I was at least
confident in the Calgary. And what else I can share with you? Just interrupting you really quickly. I’d
love to ask cause when we were preparing for this class today, Laura, we were just casually
chatting last night, and Laura mentioned a couple of really good examples as well. Some of those
students. So Laura do you want to share with us, please..
Hi definitely I was so interested to hear about your background Lana as well. I hadn’t realised it’s
like you hadn’t grown up more doing more and everything. So it’s definitely an inspiration, I think,
to hear Lana speak so fluently and so amazingly, and to know that you can achieve that as an adult.
So I myself feel much more confident about what I can do. Now, so thank you, Lana. But otherwise,
yeah, everything that Lana has said really is it’s exactly that is very great. So I was just talking to
Nathalie yesterday about a few examples of my own students. So I have one student who works for
a company called Harvey. So sells products sort of well-being products online and have like a huge
international corporation. So she works for the French company, and so to help her exactly what
Lana has said, I very much encouraged her to join her life groups in English and to be able to
interact with other people from the same company but we’re in different countries because things
like that are very rare, revolve around social media. So we really got her to work and interacting
with people on their Facebook accounts, in the groups that they had online. So again, this was
something that was not only great for her, her language skills, but for her professional skills as well
in another language, so if anyone is thinking of learning French professional courses, that is a really
great example of how you can really not only build your networking and your professional skills,
but do that while you’re working your language skills and another one I have is I have a client at the
moment, he’s very young. He’s very young, he’s in his early 20s and like many people in the early
20s, we spend a lot of time scrolling on social have come out with interesting facts that will tell me
from random videos you’ve seen about random things because you spend a lot of time on the
Instagram. I don’t know what it’s called, but I don’t really use it, but the part where you go and you
can explore and it just gives you content that you might be interested in. So anyway, when I saw
when he told me exactly how much time he was spending scrolling and doing mind numbing
scrolling and not interacting in anything, I sent him a list of Instagram accounts to follow that were
based around either things he was interested in or the things he was mindlessly consuming
anyway, so really to push on what Lana has said, it’s completely that is all about integrating the
things that you are going to consume anyway in the target language. So exactly what Lana said, so
making sure that, yeah, anything you are going to be doing in your daily life, especially let’s all be
honest, we can all probably spend a little bit less time, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s
just on TV, Netflix. I don’t know. Everyone has their thing. We all have something that we think,
yeah, probably be more productive that time, and that’s the beautiful thing about making
languages integrated in your everyday life, just as Lana said to us, it is
finding where you already spend that time and putting it in in your target language. And that
is something that everybody can do that we can all really do, really.
Really. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That’s what I also wanted I just, you just reminded me that
everybody of us spend some time, you know, in queues, you know, waiting for somebody or
someone or, you know, washing the dishes or doing some kind of monotonous work. So instead of
just letting this time go by without anything productive, we could also do something, and one of
the easiest ways, for example, to listen to podcast. Yes, or if it’s possible to watch a video or a
movie, whatever you have that you can squeeze in, even if you have 5 minutes. Because sometimes
well, really like they’re like maximalists they think ohh I need to spend every day 30 minutes or two
hours listening or doing something. No, even 5 minutes or 10 minutes make a difference, but
again, I still like all the time. I just can’t help but remind people that the content should be of your
interest, not just, you know, language rules or pronunciation, which is fine, but it should be beyond
the language too and more to that. So the topic of your interest basically, yeah.
Thank you, Lana. Thank you so much. And I I’m going to follow up with a recap of five things that I
think that you can write down along the lines of what Laura and Lana have said just so it’s nice and
structured in your mind, but before we go to that, do you have any direct questions for Lana and
what she has said so far? I’m sure she can reply. I know some of you have sent a little messages in
the chat. I’m sure she can reply to that in a while I think. So if I may, what I’d like to say is I think we
can all agree here that the keyword, if you want to live your language, the language that you are
learning is engage. Engage, engage, engage. That is the keyword. But you need to create conditions
around that. So engaging with the language on a daily basis should feel really quite natural and
effortless. This is the key. Here, remember that you can engage physically and mentally with that
language, whatever it is, for you to keep that motivation going. So the five ways that we as a team
have identified in order for you to live your language and again to summarise what Lana and Laura
have said, number one is anything that is topic based. So if you’re interested in fashion then I saw
that someone, I think it’s Laura is reading Vogue in several languages. Great. You’re interested in
sports, in wine, in food, in cars, in travel. Just pick one topic two or three. But work your
engagement around a topic. You can do it. Based on an environment. So when you go to the gym,
a dog walk, we talked about Tai chi. One of my clients when I was still coaching, adored yoga and
she was really quite an advanced learner. She was telling me how she was doing yoga every
morning. I told her to put the yoga videos in French and she doesn’t need the instructions
anymore, she knows exactly what a downward dog is, and she knows that. So I said, put the videos
in French. You are watching the videos because you want the motivation of being there every day.
You want someone to give you the rhythm of the class. You certainly don’t need the instructions in
your native tongue, you can listen in French, she said that made a huge difference to her learning.
So think about something that could be based within your environment. If you go for a dog walk
every day, is there something every day that you can do like a podcast along your dog walk where
your brain identifies dog walk to French the minute you get the dog out, your brain will start to
switch into thinking in French. #3 is technology based, so we all know now that we use an awful lot
of technologies. The girls have mentioned it. Can you change your phone into French? Are you able
to navigate around your phone if everything is written in French? If so, go for it. Apps, you know,
we all know that you could have an app and spend 5 minutes on the train if it’s a short train
journey that you do every day to put it to good use. We’ve spoken about social media, Facebook
groups, I mean Facebook groups are literally the thing of the century and we communicate with our
students more on Facebook, I believe than anywhere else. They’re in our Facebook group, they ask
questions, they watch video, they digest our content, they’ll then they’ll send us a a private
message. So Facebook group, find one of interest and quite frankly, you never even have to
engage. I think Gina talked about crochet. You don’t even have to engage with people until you feel
confident doing so. Watching and reading the information is going to be very interesting and useful.
Then #4 is relationship based. Your children, your niece, nephew, granddaughter for some of you.
Who are your language partners? Can you associate? Learning French or any other language that
you’re learning with a person. It can be someone you share your language class. It’s it can be a
cousin who lives in a foreign country. It can be anyone, someone who’s close to you. Not
necessarily. How about having a language partner? It could also be an accountability partner. If you
decide to study together and that is hugely powerful. So we have topic based. Environment based
technology based relationship based and the last little nugget which is more like a bonus nugget.
This one is time versus mindset. How about one minute a day? Have you ever heard of the one
minute rule? I think both Lana and Laura said you don’t have to do it for a long period of time but
even 10 minutes or 5 minutes can seem like a long time when we have a very busy schedule and
we have to think about work and children and the dog and bills to pay and whatever there is. I
don’t think I’m very wrong by saying that anyone can do something for one minute a day. Again, if
it’s not really, you don’t worry about it but why not give it a try? Out of all of these things that
we’ve mentioned, is there anything at all that you could do with just one minute a day? The way
your brain think, I mean this one minute technique works for loads of different things, the whole
idea behind it is for people to think well, of course I can do that for one minute. I mean, who
doesn’t have one minute? And nine times out of 10, people actually do it for 5 minutes or 10 or 15
or 30. But it all started because they’ve told themselves that they could definitely make time for
just one minute of a little French thing that they wanted to do that day, and you can choose
whatever that is.
So, Please remember that it’s all about engaging on a daily basis with something to do with the
language. It’s very personal to you. It needs to be natural. It needs to be effortless. We’re not here
talking about studying the language. We’re not here talking about learning rules putting some
structure into it. No, none of that. Living the language is very much adopting it on a daily basis,
something that’s going to bring you joy, but that’s really gonna make you go further along your
language learning journey. Again, it can be. A mental involvement but it can be a physical
involvement as well if you like to go for a jog in the morning. Think about topics. Think about
environment. Think about technology, think about relationship and think please about the one
minute rule. And the last thing here, which is really quite crucial and and Lana mentioned it as well,
is input and output. Remember that sometimes it will be your own input, sometimes it’s an output.
When you listen to a podcast whilst you walk in the dog, it’s an output. When you listen to the yoga
training session in French, that’s an output. You’re the receiver. Trying to do little things that are an
input because these variation in actions with the language are going to help you tremendously. You
may not realise it at first, but trust me, it builds up to something really quite phenomenal. So an
input could be the the little comment on LinkedIn or on Facebook. I love the LinkedIn one because
we train a lot of professionals, and all of them go on LinkedIn. That’s an advice that I’ve given
before and as Lana said, it could just be that’s a great article, thank you for sharing. That’s an input.
Do you have any questions? And Tina, definitely singing edit cat songs counts. You’re welcome to
practise. We’re on day four. We’re going to day 9. If you want to come back and sing one of them
the stage is yours. And whatever bring you joy. That’s absolutely right.
No, I’ve been there actually, songs is is a great way and not just listening to the song, but you can
find the lyric video on YouTube for example. So you can read and listen at the same time and there
are if you often just search lyrics and the name of the song you’ll find annotated versions of the
lyrics as well, which is always really nice, so people have commented what they think the lyrics
represent and things like that, which is actually a really nice way of sort of engaging with the
language a little bit further than just listening to this song as well. So it’s definitely something I’d
recommend as well.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Does anyone have any questions but also any little tips that they
themselves perhaps want to share? Thanks Usha, I’m glad that it was very helpful. I think that you
know we we perhaps all know or can all guess about this what’s important is to think about it in a
slightly more structured way. So, you’ll come across things where you go: Ohh I never noticed I was
doing this like I really like as Gina was saying, I really like French songs. So you may not always think
that you’re putting on fresh songs, just trying to learn it’s just a a nice little pleasurable thing to do.
But if you in mind think about the you know the topic and the environment and the technology
and the relationship, all these different type of environment that really helps you to pinpoint what
is actually right for you, what works really well, and actually Gina just said, I always found that
overcoming your shyness and just talk stranger works wonders. True, you definitely have to be, you
know, quite comfortable doing that. But actually this is the entire point, the entire point. And if you
start to speak to people on LinkedIn in Facebook group, even just a little bit, it’s OK, isn’t it? You
know, there’s a there’s a Facebook group called Everything French. It’s a wonderful little group
where people share brilliant things about France. I came across it in a very long ago I think it’s only
been set up about two years ago. It’s got beautiful pictures of France all the time. It’s it’s very much
a feel good figures per group. They talk about food, culture, history. There’s three or four people
who run it. They’ve got an amazing knowledge of France and being in this group, it is an English
speaking group, but quite often people will ask little French question or they’ll try to comment on
like when it was the 14th of July French national day. Quite a few tried to comment in French about
it. There won’t be a safer place for you to do that if you are quite new at learning French because
everyone there will be very, very understanding the name of the group is called everything French.
If you can’t find it, Sarah, let me know and and I’ll I’ll copy it, cause I I’m part of it, but it is really,
really good.
Sorry, Natalie, there’s I just looked it up there’s about three groups called Everything French
OK, I haven’t got my phone with me, show me, I think I’ve just seen it. It’s the first one, just a nice
little icon.
Thank you. Thank you.
It’s the first one, yeah. No more questions? Is anyone brave enough to tell us something they are
going to implement?
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think all of this is interesting, Natalie. Yeah, definitely topic brand topics like I
haven’t are varied interest. So yeah, I’ll definitely be looking up things in French for my gardening or
my Tai Chi. Yeah, yeah, that’s like I actually, I said that some some very useful tips. But I mean,
there’s a lot of tips there that I can really take on board. So yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Brilliant. And you know, don’t don’t think that you’ve got to do all of it so you know, just starting
with the one minute is amazing. Moving on to the topic is fabulous I know that a lot of the
students who join our French programmes and up having little French body, we encourage that a
need for a lot, sometimes when we know the students personality quite well, we say I or or or. If
you have some, we know we have something in common interest, family and social background
will say I think so and so could be your accountability partner. You can, you know, you can work
together, you can help each other when you work out on your friends outside the class. So don’t
do it all at once. But there’s a lot, an awful lot that can be done, but it’s very much what we’ve said
all along in this master class is about having something structured. It’s about having something
that really means something to you and something that is achievable. You know it is achievable. It
is digestible because if that’s the case it will then form part of your routine and your language
studies will become part of your lifestyle and then it’s just extremely enjoyable and you keep with
it, and you get progress. Yeah. So, well, I just wanted to say thank you very much. The the Master
clas is about to end, you are very welcome to stay for a little bit longer. You’re very welcome to
contact us privately and ask any questions. So we’ve, sorry, we’ve gone through day. 123 and four
now. We’ve basically covered most of our blueprints, if you like most of the solid learning
strategies that we share with our students have pretty much been covered. So if you think that
you’ve learned enough and now you can go off on your own and you feel very confident that
whatever you’ve chosen to learn French, you can get on with it. Then I’m conscious of your time
and you may not want to be there for the the remaining days that we have planned, we’re running
throughout the weekend and until next Tuesday. If, however, you think that the info that you’ve
had so far are very useful, but that you’d like to progress because you’d like to work with more
professional like ours, then please stay because the next few days are gonna be really quite
practical. The next few days we are going to present our French ambition programme, which is
brand new, that we are starting out as an online programme that we’re extremely proud of. We’ve
put years of research into it. I think that all that we’ve done in the French department so far, which
has been the king language variety for the last 14 years, all of that has been great, but I think the
French ambition programme is really the best of all that we’ve done. If you think that. You’d really
want to find ways of working with the team of professionals to either Kick Start your friends to this
or really really take them to the next step, then please stick around. Stick around because we are
going to talk about that in more details in. The next few days you are going to meet some of our
students. They will explain to you their journey here we are doing hot seats. I think that’s on
Sunday. On Sunday we’re doing like a customised learning journey for you. So you come with
where you are, where you’re going, you can ask us questions. We’re going to answer all these
questions for you, etcetera. OK. So that’s just what I am, you know, wanted to finish this class with.
I really, really hope that the first four days, which really are the main pillars of of the grounding, if
you like, for all our students, have been extremely useful. But if you really want them more, more
if you’re really fired to speak French very well, then please stick around. We will still be here every
day at 12:00. O’clock UK time until next Tuesday.
OK.
Well, thank you very much everyone. And as always, e-mail, WhatsApp, Facebook, whatever. I’ll be
there to answer your questions. Take care everyone, and thank you very much. Au revoir, merci

Thank you very much everyone for being here. I was just saying offline that I cannot believe it’s
already day five and I hope that you have enjoyed the classes so far as much as I have, we have very
familiar faces every day, which must be good news. Today is a little bit of a bonus session. OK, we’re
on day five and as a brief recap, day one to four, we looked at a lot of learning strategies, personality
in color, what type of learner you are and what’s going to trick your brain into learning French better
and faster. We looked at a blend of different techniques online, offline, and different resources, so
the way that you use those resources and how that can really help you to learn a foreign language.
And yesterday we talked about how to live the language and how you can engage with the language.
The day before, we looked at planning your language lessons and your language journey as a whole
with a bit of a blueprint of how we do things here at the Academy and it works very well, today, the
reason why it’s a bonus session, it’s because we want to talk to you about confidence in language
learning. And I think I’m right in saying that when people talk about starting to learn a new foreign
language about improving their language skill about reaching mastery. So regardless of where you are
in your language, learning journey at the moment, whenever we have an open discussion about it.
Confidence is a word that comes right at the top of the list. Yeah, I think we can all agree on that.
The thing is that there are many ways that you can be more confident in a foreign language, but
today we want it to be more of an open forum. Why? Because it’s an inner emotion, isn’t it? It’s
something that is deeply personal, so it is something that can vary from one person to another, from
one student to another, an awful lot. And whilst I feel very qualified and experienced to give you the
tools to learn French, looking at all that we’ve covered from day one to day four with lots of different
learning strategies and a lot of planning that I’m an expert at. I really wouldn’t feel comfortable
telling you how you as a learner of French can become more confident. I don’t think that I am
qualified to do so, and I don’t think that I know you well enough to confidently say that I can tell you
how to be confident in learning, experiencing, progressing in French. But what my team and I can do
is give you even more tools or tell you about stories that hopefully will inspire you, and I think that a
lot of people on the call have learnt French or another foreign language before, so I would really love
to hear about your experiences and how you may have found that you were getting more confident
in French using one thing or another, being in an environment or another. OK. That sounds good.
Yeah. Obviously I always share with you that the reason why I love the job that I do is because #1
being bilingual has opened many doors for me in my private and professional life. It made me be
more confident with myself as well as a person, undoubtedly. But also I don’t do what I do just to
teach languages. You know my why is a little bit deeper than that my why is 100% in the confidence
that I give students as human beings, not just as students, I absolutely love observing the booze that
people get when they feel they can achieve something through a foreign language that truly is where
I get a great kick out of what I do. As you know, I started teaching very young children and more
recently I’ve run a series of videos and I interviewed one of my oldest students, who is now 24. She
came to my French classes when she was maybe four or five and we had an interview. She’s now
fluent in French. She studied for a year in Paris and she now works in the city with French and I said to
her at the end of the interview, thank you so much for having been there 20 years ago, when it all
started, because I certainly would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for children like you who
completely inspired me and made my job a dream. And she replied no, I owe you more.
And this has made my day, my week, my year. I’ll remember this on my deathbed for sure. And that’s
truly, I think, what languages do to you when done in a proper way or experienced in a really nice,
pleasant way. They give you a huge amount of confidence. Again, the reason why I would rather we
shared stories or talked, perhaps openly about some of the resources of experiences that we’ve had
is because again, I think that confidence is very is kind of an inner feeling and it’s super personal.
Some people will say I’ll just have a go you know you go to the country, go on holiday, even in your
French class, just have a go and then you’ll get more confident for some other people, they cannot
think of anything worse. Others will say that school has given them a really good grounding, so it’s
made them confident enough to look at taking the language studies to the next level. Unfortunately,
the way this school education system has been set up and that’s not where we are here in the UK,
but in many European or world countries. All the countries not very much dampen students’ opinion
of themselves of being able to learn a foreign language, so for some people, school teaching meant
that they left school thinking, not like learning a foreign language is just not good for me.
Sometimes, such as myself, love learning foreign languages, so I love learning English at school, so
when I graduated from high school, my first thought was I’m gonna go over to America. I’m gonna be
an au-pair. I wanna come back speaking fluent English and when I got there, I found that, you know, I
lived in Ohio, which was really the most open-minded of areas, and I don’t think they’ve seen that,
me foreigners or French people, and I remember going to rent a tape, you know, because I’m fairly
old, so we had, we were watching, you know, those VCR tapes. And I went and got to one weekend
and one of them wasn’t working, so I brought it back on Monday and I said, you know, I paid for two,
but one didn’t work, so can I get a credit and the person behind the till wasn’t particularly pleasant.
But on top of that, apparently I wasn’t really explaining myself very well, we still agreed that I would
get a free tape whenever I came back. I went there many weeks later and when I got to the till and
explained the situation, she seemed a little bit puzzled and a little bit grumpy. And then she got a
piece of paper with my name on it and my ID light number was called Blockbuster at the time. At
the bottom of it from behind the till I could read “doesn’t speak very good English”. I still remember
it today. It was in 1995. And that really hurt me. See this could do two things, depending on your
personality. It could make you completely shy away from ever wanting to speak to someone in a
shop anymore, or it could be like me, feeling really hurt, get in the car, have a little tear and then say
I don’t think so I am going to be so fluent that if I ever meet you one day mine is gonna be better
than yours. But we all react really, really, really differently. So our job here today guys is to see if we
can share little tools with you. But also you can share your stories and perhaps we can give it some
thoughts together. So we’re going to have, yesterday we were having a meeting about today’s class
and Sasha shared something really interesting about his own way of gaining confidence, speaking
French even though that’s one of his mother tongues. OK, which I think you should hear. And then
my colleague Laura is going to share with you a new digital resource that we use with our students
called Hypnoledge, you may have heard of it, it is fairly new on the market, I think it’s only been
brought up three or four years ago. We have partnered with this French company, because we feel
that it could be another element of blended learning that we could bring into our language
programmes, we could really help our learners as a matter of fact, for our new ambition programme
that is starting in, Here comes Usha. Hi, usha. It’s starting and that’s the the new, the new ambition
programme that is starting in September, we are actually offering all our learners to get set up on the
platform 2 weeks before they start that programme for reasons that Laura will help a little bit later
on with. So oh, and also I would love to share, I’ve put in my notes here I have a friend who is a
language coach for language learners in Washington DC we’ve done some work together and more
recently. Can you hear me? Ohh sorry, I just had a note to say I can’t hear you. OK, ignore me. More
recently I ran a series of videos which you may have seen if you subscribe to our YouTube channel,
I’ve run a series of videos interviewing people who I felt could really help our learners and Melissa
Chapman being a language coach for language learners helps people an awful lot with all their inner
feelings and what’s happening inside themselves to make them more confident. And so, for
example, she looked for the like spots in Washington, DC she has some great things to say about her
methodology. So I interviewed her. It was back in the winter, I’ve got the video, which I will drop in
our chat as well, and I thoroughly recommend that you take some time to look at it. It’s only about
20 minutes. So without further due, why don’t we start with you, Sasha? And why don’t you spend a
little bit of time telling us what you told Laura and I yesterday about how you got more confident in
recent years speaking French.
Yeah, absolutely. Hello, everyone. So one of the main things for me, which is definitely immersion.
You have to be in an area where you know you can’t be bailed out. You can’t think ohh if I don’t know
this, it’s OK because I can just go back to English and for me that was going and visiting my French
grandparents every summer. Every Christmas, Easter, whenever I could be there. I was there from a
very young age, until even now. And it meant that I was in an environment where, you know, if I
didn’t know a word or if I was saying things wrong. Yes, they would correct me, but in you know the
nicest way possible and just very, you know it was never turn into a lecture. It was just. Ohh no, it’s
not that and I would pick up on it. Without even realising and then I find myself making less and less
mistakes as time goes on. As well as the fact you know I’m with my family. So it’s a very comfortable
environment. I’m not nervous about making a mistake, but I also appreciate, you know, not everyone
has a bilingual family. Not everyone has French grandparents. So another thing was, I decided to do
French for A level, so I took my GCSE very young. I was about 12. Well, and it meant I hadn’t had
structured French lessons in four or five years. And so I got to A level and I initially didn’t take French
and then I switched the course and took French, but I realised that while my French oral skills were
perfect, my writing wasn’t as good as it should have been. Because I grew up in an environment
where I was always speaking French my mum never sat me down and had me write French lessons,
which I think is a good thing cause I think all that would have done was make me just hate the
language. And so I decided to do a course at VICI with Cecile, who we met a few days ago. And she
gave me a really structured learning which brought my French to as close as my English as possible,
and that not only did it make me feel better about myself, because I was able to finally speak the
level of French I’ve always aspired to, but it just made me more confident. One thing I noticed when I
would speak French is I would stutter a lot because I’m catching myself from making mistakes, but I
think that happens a lot lot less. Because I’m far more confident and if I do make an error I almost
don’t care because I know I know when I make an error now, and sometimes it’s force of habit,
because I’ve been saying that same thing wrong for many years but I know when I’m making the
mistake so I don’t need to be caught up on it, and that knowing I have that just meant I was far more
confident in my friends ability than I ever was before.
Brilliant. Thank you. So for me, what I hear obviously I know the story, but what I hear here is being
in a safe environment, feeling comfortable in an environment where you can make mistakes that is
so important, but also structure. And to me, all these ingredients are vital. If you feel that you are
evolving in an environment where making mistakes is part of the norm and I am 100 to 500% one of
these people that believe that no mistakes, no progression in a foreign language, this is virtually
impossible. This is the one thing you will learn where making mistakes is part of the journey. Like
there is, it’s impossible to not make mistakes in the foreign language and progress. No, it’s just
impossible, isn’t it? Laura there’s just no two ways around it. So to me, being in a safe and
comfortable environment is extremely important, but the structure is also important so you
understand the more you progress, the more you’re motivated and the more confident you get.
Would anyone on the call today would like to share their story? It doesn’t have to be about French.
If you are at the very early journey, you know of your language here, it could be with another
language or it could be with anything that you’ve learned. How have you gained confidence and
how did it happen? Would anyone like to share?
I just say that and I’ve got a I’ve gotta a school friend, an old school friend who moved to Italy when
she got married because her family moved to Italy, and every time I go, I always think I’m gonna
learn Italian. I’m gonna learn Italian. I like with the French. I can pick out bits of Italian and get a gist
of what they may be saying. But I’ve tried to self teach myself and that just didn’t really work. So I
agree with you about the structure and also being speaking in confidence is going to be my biggest
hurdle is being confident to speak the language. So I was a bit disappointed with that Italian, but
obviously I was going with the way with it the right way. But I’m so excited about the French there,
I’m pretty sure I’m gonna work this one out.
And also you’ve got a huge compelling reason with your granddaughter to want to learn. I mean
you can’t match that for sure and I just wanna pick up on a self study. I’m a huge believer in self
studying. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that you know I run a company that provides
language training programmes where we give our students an awful lot of support. The reason
why I love self study is because it means that you are #1 taking ownership of your own progression
and that helps an awful lot. #2 is the immersion fact. The more you do little bits and pieces there,
remember when we talked about the one minute rule yesterday and the more you will be
immersed in the language and more, you’ll get your brain engaged in the language, et cetera. So
that’s the snowball effect. But the self study element means that you take ownership of what’s
happening and that is an important part. Having said that, I do not believe that you can learn a
foreign language only through self study. I think we all have and that may be another discussion
for another day. We all have a different definition on what it means to be able to speak a foreign
language. We touch upon this really lightly on day one, the term bilingualism is defined extremely
differently from one bunch of linguists here to another there OK for some and and in our industry
it’s a constant debate, isn’t it, Laura? Like you watch, you know, you read article on LinkedIn, you
go to webinars. There’s always a debate on what bilingualism truly means. For some people, it’s
just being able to get by confidently. For others, it’s completely mastery of the language, but this
aside, even getting by in a foreign language I don’t believe can be achieved through self studies
only, unless you are clearly really gifted at the language and also that you spend considerable time
on it, it is extremely difficult even if you’re super motivated to pull yourself together every day and
study for a period of time. But most importantly, you don’t actually know what you need to do
unless you are already a linguist and have analysed your own way of learning how you know you sit
there and go. OK? So, like, what do you do then iIf I put you in my job tomorrow. You could sit here
all day and be very willing if you’ve never run a language training company before. With all the
willingness in the world without knowing how we work, what you’re going to do, being polite to
customers and offering coffee and answering a few emails politely and courteously, but we’ll be
able to run the company. It’s the same thing. So, there was a study many, many years ago about 8-9
years ago, I read a study of people who had learnt. A foreign language on their own, one hour
each. Right some of them really managed to hold a really decent conversation. Guess how many
years it took them to do so. You sure you would just about be ready for your granddaughters
graduation because it takes 17 years. I think that you can definitely cause we’re talking about
confidence. I think you can definitely find confidence in the routine that you’re going to have the
little kick that you get. I know you want to go on the ambition programme like you’re going to get
a platform with lots of different short, authentic French videos. If you get into the routine of
watching a little video, even it doesn’t have to be every day, it’s not a requirement to study French
every day. But even if you go every other day for 5 minutes, you’re gonna get a huge amount of
confidence out of that and in the early stages the confidence is not going to come out of the
language that you learn. Because it takes a little bit longer than that, the confidence is gonna come
out of the commitment that you’ve made to really get on with that, that’s where the confidence
will come from. So don’t be discouraged by the fact that you had already told yourself you may
learn Italian and you didn’t do it. I’ve been saying that I wanna learn Spanish for a very long time.
And I’m not very far yet, and I have the team to help me having a compelling reason guys truly is,
you know wonderful. Sasha went to Valencia this summer, he came back saying that he really
wanted to learn Spanish and I felt great, let’s do it together. I’ve always thought I should either
learn Spanish or Italian, but now he’s saying that after university wants to do a master in Italy. So
I’m like, Oh well, if he learns Italian, maybe I can learn Italian. So it’s a little leisurely activity for me.
I was a lot more focused when I was learning English. So once you know why you’re learning, even
if it’s just a series of your personal development and once you have a plan, you’ll definitely get
there. I’m gonna kick your **** anyway. Just so you know that’s part of the prize, it’s part of the
package you pay for that as well. You’re welcome. Lynn, would you share because you’ve got a
lovely story. Your English. You lived in France for a number of years and you feel that you’ve
reached a bit of a plateau with your French learning and you’d like to go for French nationality, you
need to take an exam. Any stories that you could share with us? How confident you’ve been from
the early stages of your learning French until now and now if you’re not really getting to the B1
level you’d like to get 2 is this a confidence thing? Is this anything else?
It’s kind of a mix, I guess. When I first arrived in France my children were all under 5. So in school I
had to communicate for them. So I was forced to speak French and I felt that I was progressing really,
really well, to start with. But now they’re all teenagers doing baccalaureate and above, and there’s
no input for me, I have no part of it, so I don’t need to speak French for them anymore. I’m still
forced to speak French in certain circumstances when when my children were younger, I made a rule
that I had to speak French every day. Even one sentence to somebody, I had to speak French. So the
poor mums at the school gate started to avoid me because they didn’t want to have to put up with
my French. So it was a bit difficult for that. I did make some absolutely lovely, lovely friends. The
other mums, the friends of my children, so I made some lovely friends who’d find me for coffee. We
speak French about, you know, day-to-day things. So yes, I was progressing. And at that time, I was
having lessons. It was only once a month. It was a retired French man and he just did it for a little bit
of extra money. So whenever there was anything I heard that I didn’t understand or maybe I hadn’t
been able to explain, well, I would make a note of it and then ask to review it in the lesson. But it
became difficult because the other people in the class in the group kind of resented me taking over 5
minutes of their lesson to do that. So you’ve got hurdles all the way, I think. And you’ve gotta find a
way to get around those hurdles. But now, as you know, I’m an English teacher, so I speak English all
day at my job, just the occasional conversation with a secretary or something in French or
administration in French. And I speak English to maintain my children’s English because they speak
French all day so that’s it. I lost my confidence in a big way when I was mocked by some colleagues.
English colleagues and now I refuse to speak French in their presence..
So here we go.
So This is why now I have no confidence.
So, well, first of all, I’m very sorry to hear that, and I can totally relate, OK, because it’s happened to
me as well. It’s happened when I was in America, it’s also happened in England. I get complimented
on my English very often and I often say that, you know, perhaps I was quite lucky. I’ve never really
had a strong French accent. I always had a bit of a flair for the language. But I also worked extremely
hard at it to gain respect. And it’s a little sad because I think that we should, you know, all accept
each other and the world would be a better place. But facts are that people like yourself still get hurt
by unpleasant comments, so I’m really sorry about this and I really want to try and talk about things
that you can do to go around that. Because I think that your story is very interesting, and it is yet a
stories that shows that you need the right environment. You need the right people in front of you,
you need the right structure, you know, going out and live in France is not going to make you
completely fluent if you don’t have all this in place, that there’s really there’s. This is a common belief
that all you have to do is kind of export yourself from one country to another and whilst it will go a
long way into helping you to improve your language skills, it will not make you completely fluent. I
have countless stories of people who have not managed to be completely fluent because they kind
of just left it to be in the country, and hoped for the best, and it’s just not working. I think for me
from what you said, the keyword really is environment. You know you talked about the environment
when you took your children to school. Suddenly that environment is taken away from you because
they speak French like native kids and so don’t need you anymore. Then you find yourself in an
environment with this gentleman. That was helpful but perhaps not really the right structure. And
now you teach English all day. And so, you know, you know, you just don’t really have the time to
practise. Laura, you may not have the answer. This is not a prepared question, but on the back of
what Lynn says or just said you are an English person as well, even though you’ve been raised
bilingually just like Sasha English is your stronger language. Do you have any tips for Lynn? Have you
also ever been in this environment or in this situation?
I think anyone who has ever dared to speak a foreign language in front of other people has been, has
some kind of negative comment, has been mocked. It’s horrible. And people, I think often don’t
realise the bravery that it takes and also, let’s not forget that a lot of people who are going to mock
an accent are people who only speak one language. And you often make mistakes in their own
language. Do you know how many times that has happened to me as well? People would hear me.
For example, when I was very young, my dad is Belgian, he didn’t speak excellent English. He didn’t
speak any English when we arrived in England. So I would speak in French when I was young and I
would hear the people in the queue in front of us just mocking us for speaking another language
which you know is just baffling. Anyway, so I think that firstly it’s knowing that you know you’re not
alone in that feeling of having been mocked by someone for an accent or for speaking another
language. I don’t know why people do it, but they do, so I think personally, personally. Sorry is. Kind
of building that resilience of saying you know what but I’ve gone there and I’ve tried and I’ve done it
and I have communicated what I need to get and that is you know that is the goal of language. That’s
the goal of learning to be able to communicate something so I do, I thought through a lot that you
have decided not to speak in French with these other ladies, but I fully understand that sometimes
you know it does have a huge knock on our confidence, so part of language learning really is as well
building that confidence in the second language or the other language to really build
yourself. But in terms of practical test, I think it depends on the kind of person you are as well. It’s so
personalised for you, but I think that it is, you know, firstly remembering that you are alone, you’re
not, you’re not sorry, alone in that feeling of feeling much for somebody else for speaking another
language. That it’s just something that happens to everybody. And secondly that you’re so brave for
trying and for doing it and daring to speak to somebody because it can be very, very intimidating.
Well, so I think it’s just, you know, the more that we practise and the more you do it, the more you
build resilience and the more the lesser that affects you. I mean sometimes I have, so I grew up
speaking bilingually like Sasha, but I struggle a little bit with the writing side of it, because I didn’t
grow up writing French, so sometimes I will write a message isn’t perhaps as eloquent as I would
have liked it to have been, and even you know, at mine and Sasha’s stage and Matthew’s stage now
where we are so proficient in our in our language. Yes, sometimes we make little mistakes,
sometimes people are what we say, that’s part of being a human as well and daring to pick us up out
in the world. So I’m afraid I haven’t really answered the question of practical tests but I think it really
is just building that resilience, that whatever that means for you, that resilience to be able to
continue, daring to put yourself. That, and just the more you practise and now sometimes we just let
those comments like wash over us, you don’t even listen to it doesn’t affect us so much, you know, to
to just grab on to what Laura said about her I still make mistakes in English, but then so do I in French.
I think you know that’s the beauty about speaking a foreign language. It’s not a scientific equation. 2
+ 2 can be 4, it can be 4.2. Maybe 4.7 providing you put your point across it works, so I don’t think
that anyone can honestly say that they make no grammatical mistakes or structural mistakes in their
own mother tongue so that’s the way I look at it. The way I look at it is I’ve been here for 21 years. I
think my level of English is very good. Could it be better? Probably. Do I still make mistakes? Of
course I do. But then so do I in French, especially when your brains start to think in two languages all
the time. So think about it as a, you know, a mistake when you speak a foreign language a slightly
strong act and all of that to me is a sign of bravery. It’s also really it because at least you’ve tried and
you’ve put yourself out there. That brings me to say that there is an element of being willing to put
yourself out of your comfort zone. I can give you all the best tools in the world. I can, you know, map
out everything that I’ve learned in the last 20 years of running a language training company. I can
chew the amazing results that we’ve had with our students. I know what we do works. You will need
to get a little bit out of your comfort zone at some point. That’s just a huge element of wanting to
learn a foreign language and to the point of Laura, she still makes mistakes when she says, for
example, wants to write a blog in French. I do the same in English, so we send each other’s work and
we spoke about that, didn’t we? I can’t remember what day it was. We spoke about having a
language buddy, someone with whom you can be without being judged. You know I’m Laura’s boss. I
could say, well, I’m not gonna send you a blog, cause surely I should, like, write a blog without
mistakes? Absolutely not. Part of progressing is also being vulnerable. Is also saying when we need
help that works for anything in life. So if I write an article or for our website for the newspaper or you
know this master class that we’ve run this is the first time we’ve run it. We’ve had amazing feedback.
So we’ve spoken about putting it into an entire booklet that we can then give people and that will be
our blueprint of how you should be prepared before starting our language programme from when
we design it. I’m likely to say to Laura, you know, it’s gonna be in English. I’m like, could say to like,
you know, how does that sound? Should I change that prepositions in English? And you know what
makes me feel good is sometimes I can see she needs to think about it. So it tells me that I’ve got, it’s
legitimate when I ask the question, but find a language buddy. Someone you can pair it with
someone you can ask questions to because that will really really help you. I miss being a chatterbox.
Is that you, Lynn? Ohh, yeah. Two people. Ohh, great, right? Ohh that’s really good. So you know,
another thing is well, Lynn is there something or somewhere where you can go? Be it where you live
in France online, where you could have this little safe place? Is there a little group you can find? Is
there, you know? A little club that you can go to. Could you be online? You know, we talked about
Facebook groups the other day. I’ve actually gotten to know people on Facebook groups just because
we had the same interest. And then we ended up chatting. I was chatting to a lady last night and I
mean obviously that was in English, but I’m thinking you know, could they be somewhere you could
go or you know we definitely people would come on our ambition programme. We really tried as
much as we could to match people up. And so try and have even just once a month a little virtual
coffee together. It’s really, really, really helpful having the community around you will definitely help
you progress. So it would be really nice now for us to kind of showcase this new platform called
Hypnoledge. What I’m going to do. So Laura is going to take care of that cause Laura as well as
running the French company is also our language coordinator and she’s we’ve got three different
digital platforms that we add to the blend. I like that word or buy language programmes too, for
adults and one for children. And Laura is the expert she knows them way better than I do. So just a
little bit of background about Hipnoledge and then I will send you, I’ve got a couple of videos
actually, one in French, one in English. I interviewed the founder of Hypnoledge, the psychologist and
hypnotherapist. One of them is three of them who’ve decided to put together a digital platform in
order to help people learn foreign languages. So I will send you both videos, you can watch them in
French and English. One of them, the one in French, is from the founder. The one in English is from
one of their business development manager who speaks in English. The one little thing I want to say
before I hand over to Laura is this is not a sales pitch. We do not make any money out of using
Hypnoledge, we pay the company a fee, which is the exact same fee you would pay if you went and
bought it yourself. So when we promote technology, it’s really because you are constantly
researching new resources out there that could really potentially benefit our past students, you know,
so this is not a sales pitch. We’re not, we’re not financial partners of Hypnolede or anything like that
we do believe in the platform we’ve both used it we enjoyed it. Cards on the table out of about 20 of
our students who tried it out, about half loved it and half were not so keen on it. But so I just wanted
to tell you that however, it is entirely designed to help primarily confidence building that’s why I
thought it would be a really, really good time to present it to you today. So, Laura, over to you.
Thank you. So yeah, we’re gonna take you a little walk through the site, show you exactly what you
can do and how it helps you really build on your confidence as well as just your language skills. And
so to begin with that address the name Hypnoledge, so you might have heard it has the kind of hyp
like hypnosis in it. I’m going to begin by saying this is the medical kind of hypnosis. And not the
kind of show hypnosis where you might see where they stick your fingers and you put like a chicken,
it’s not that. OK. That’s like a whole show. Hypnosis really is founded on medical and psychological
principles of hypnosis in the terms of meditation and things like that, so I don’t know if anyone is
interested in meditation and things like that. If there’s something that you feel works for you or that
you believe in. If you do, then Hypnoledge is probably going to be something that you’ll enjoy.
However, as Natalie said, some people find the concept just frustrating. It’s not necessarily that’s
getting it’s like what we said about blended learning, not everything is gonna be your thing and
that’s right. You know that really works well for people who do very much believe in sort of
meditation and that sort of believing in and finding your conscious brain. That is really what the
whole platform is about. So I’m gonna share my screen and I will show you. So I think. Now you can
see the screen I have. Here, then, so let’s have a look at Hypnoledge. So we have a few different
parts of it that I’m going to talk you through so the first thing you can do is a placement test, so this
is really nice and this relates to the CEPA levels that we spoke about to the A1 all the way up to C2.
So the first thing you can do is the little placement test to help you see where exactly you should
start as I said that this is a placement test that is very much integrated within the platform. So it’s
it’s less precise than maybe the other ones that we offer from external accredited placement tests
as well, this one is just very much to kind of see how you work with the platform and how well you
can do things that are that are there. So let’s have a look, so you have a series of lessons that you
can unlock as you go along. So you see I haven’t spent very much time on French one because I
haven’t big French I’ve been studying Spanish on it lately, so you’ll see that here I have not very
many classes that are unlocked the more you do the more it unlocks, so it’s very much a structured
way. Again as we said; wasn’t going up, so let’s have a look. You can either go by lessons which
revolve around themes, so this one. So this means that they are meeting each other and they’re
gonna speak about meetings. So this I’m on very basic level as you can see you can go up to
beginner, intermediate and expert. So there are a lot of different levels. We’ll start with a very basic
one though, because the videos, so the audio, sorry as we increase and level do get a little bit longer
as well, so I thought we just have a very quick look at one of the beginner videos. So we do is we
click on the video, the audio, sorry. So the first thing that we can do is listen to the lesson. So the
thing and it’s really interesting about Hypnoledge is that it is accessing your subconscious mind and
helping you to feel calm and prepare your brain for learning. That is really what the speciality of this
platform is. So you’ll see that before we listen to the lesson, we undergo a very short session of. If
necessary, call I think when I do this, I think of it more as like a little mini meditation to get you calm
to remove all of those thoughts that are wearing around your brain just to get you very calm and
sort of in the, in the process in the state, ready to learn, ready to remove all of the additional
information, all of the additional things that we’ve all got I think around bring all the time, clear that
away and get your mind really ready and focused on the language. So you choose either a gentle
hypnosis or a deep hypnosis. Yes, you know you can choose the deep hypnosis is a little bit longer.
The gentle hypnosis is a bit shorter and you can choose the accent that you prefer as well, which is
quite nice you really personalise, it’s something that you find very calming and it helps you the best.
So should we have a little listen to the I don’t know if you’re able to hear the sound.
No, no. Is it playing at the moment? Because I can’t, yeah.
No, OK, I didn’t. I wasn’t. Sure. If you would hear the sound so I would have a look at this. The best
thing essentially is a little mini 2 minute session where the voice that we chose is telling us to close
our eyes. We do some deep breathing and then it’s very much about relaxing the mind, relaxing the
body and getting you fully ready to learn so it really is about preparing your your mind and body for
that state of learning. The next thing is a little very authentic audio that you will listen to. They
suggest you do it while your eyes closed and you will really concentrate on the language. I admit that
sometimes I do these as they go for a little walk as well, so they suggest that you stay sort of away
from your computer and you close your eyes and really focus on it. Sometimes I do them while I’m
walking to kind of get that into my daily routine. Again so it’s up to you what you prefer. To listen to
the little audio, it will be conversations, very functional language. So we’re around themes of
meeting people, making guitar reservations, talking about school, talking about work, things like
that. So you listen through to the audio and then afterwards we can look at the vocabulary that we
will have heard. So we can see we have some little flash cards. We can also click on them to hear
how it is said as well, so we can listen to the words. The thing that’s interesting here and the thing.
That is very. Revolved around science on how we learn language is that you see we
Have, yeah, the word in French or short it, we have the words in English nice to meet you. We have
a sound that you can listen to and you have a picture. So this is what we were speaking about
earlier in the week where the IT means that you associate the word with the concept and not just
with the translation in English, this is literally making a little too much of the science. It’s very
much making neurological pathways in your brain from the concept to the word or the sounds as
well, so it’s combining the orthographics with a written form of the word the oral what we hear
sound of the word and the concept combining these three things together and not necessarily
passing through English to translation for it. So This is why the the whole platform of English is very
much based around how you how the brain works as well. It’s a very, very very cyclical, you know,
it’s been created by psychologists. It’s really something that is revolved around the brain. And so
you go through the vocabulary, you’ll have a look, you go through all. Then as we come back and
after we’ll have a look at the grammar congregation. So the reason we do grammar afterwards is
because you would have already heard the discourse. You would have heard the dialogue. Then we
point out some of the rules that you would have heard within the audio. So this is very, very much
working on helping you to immersing the language first and then helping you to recognise the
graphical rules and what you have heard. So this is really great if we have a look at this we can go
to the exercises so the first kind of exercise is we have grammar and congregation ones, so working
on the rules that you have just looked at. So does anyone wanna help with this one? So something
is kind of young so don’t have an idea what we will put in here. I’ll give you a clue. We would have
heard it in the audio quite often, if we had listened to it. Does anyone have a guess how we could
say you are Canadian, you are a girl. Great, excellent, perfect everybody won in the chat. Let’s
make sure we’re right. Exactly. So we would go through and we would choose the right answer. For
example, L with an S into Leon, E with an S edition with C and Italian. Then I’ll have an idea which
one would be the correct answer here, I’ll give you a clue that one of them is grammatically
correct. The other two are erratically incorrect. I want to see excellent. Great. So as you see, we go
through and these are different kind of art. So some of them we have to physically produce the
language, breaking it in and some of them we just have to receive the language finding the correct
answers. So this is balancing the production and the comprehension side. Again we won’t go
through all of these as you can have a good look at them all in your own time. So we could
continue later so we can come back to it afterwards as well, which is Nice. And then finally, we also
have some different vocabulary exercises. So this is again finding the expressions that are related
to what we have heard in the text. So it’s just exercises really to continue practising on language.
Afterwards, we also have the thing that is very interesting about English as I said, it is all about the
science behind the brain. So I would just like to take you to through the inner keys. Let’s have a
look. So look the more you work, the more hypno keys you you gain, so it’s kind of like if anyone
who’s Duolingo, you get the lingos that you couldn’t, you could buy special outfits for your owl or
stuff like that which I love is very fun in Hypnoledge however, the hypno keys that you can get, you
can buy, you can unlock different courses. Notice when I say buy, I mean with the currency of the
platform, meaning you’re not spending extra money on it, it’s the more keys that you earn while
you work you can buy different skills. So these boosts are, as they’ve said, unique hypnosis
sessions to improve your abilities and well-being. So this is really where it is helping you unlock
that confidence within yourself. There are many meditation sessions that you can do again and
again, that focus on improving specific skills that are related to language learning but that are not
learning the language itself. For example helping you understand how you can improve your
memory, you can go and to be able to remember new vocabulary, new sentence, structures to be
able to use them increasing your ability to concentrate again very is very essential as well if we are
learning a language, so there are just a series of different skills that you can learn increasing your
well-being, feeling confident. So there really are sort of soft skills around
language learning that are all to do with increasing your confidence and being able to, you know feel
better within yourself and be able to feel more confident when you are speaking and when you are
taking those risks to come and speak with people. So as I said, it is very, very much the soft scales
that are around language learning alongside the actual learning of the language itself. So we’ll have
a little scroll through maybe if you find any that you think you’d be really interested in doing, we can
write them in the chat quickly if you find one that you think, oh, it actually really love to do that.
I think that confidence in all situations and developing self esteem can be really good. These are the
ones that I recommend to learners who come to us with a really strong willingness to learn the
language. But I can tell that a lot of things are holding them back. I often tell them to start with the.
With with this programme.
Yeah, definitely. And we have about public speaking as well, which is, you know, a skill that we have
to develop in our first language as well as our second language and speaking in front of an audience
so you can see these are very, very much kind of helping on your personal development as well and
the last other thing I wanted to show is we have a psycho emotional question. Yeah. So I have
already done the questionnaire and it is all about evaluating your own psychoemotional strengths
and weaknesses. So it’s a series of questions that you can look at to decide whether you are quite
sort of strong in certain areas such as if you feel confident to go speak if you don’t know or not, and
where your weaknesses are in other areas. So to really help you understand what you need to target
to improve your own confidence. So I personally I really enjoy Hypnoledge. I use it quite a lot every
week. Actually I have my little Monday evening scheduled session every Monday. I I really enjoy it. I
think it’s very interesting. I enjoy kind of the relaxation side of it because I can be someone who is
maybe a little bit more like a bit. And with the high strung, but someone who is maybe a little bit
less calm in certain situations, so for me I find it’s very good to kind of help me relax, remove the
stress of the day and really get into the process of being ready to learn. I think Natalie you quite
enjoyed it as well.
Yeah. So for me, I enjoyed it because I tried it with Spanish. So within the team, we all tried it with a
language that we aspired to learn. I tried it with Spanish and if you watch the video when I talk to
one of their team member, it it really is quite incredible because I could feel after the little bit of
relaxation that when I was doing the exercises at my basic level it was coming out much quicker. I
wasn’t thinking too much about the answer I was giving it a go and you know, remember that despite
the fact that I do the work that I do I learned English in a very traditional way. Today, when I learned
English, there was no digital platforms. There was no blended learning. It was very much school, very
structured learning, which actually for my personality was not very fitted. So for me to go on this
platform and have a look at how my brain could change the way that I was learning I have found it
really really good, but for me it was just really that I literally I would listen to the little exercises and I
felt that it was flowing. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t always getting the answers right but I was just
going for it. So for me, I felt that the confidence in giving it a go the app was really giving me that.
I found as well. I think it’s really helped my oral comprehension as well so I can see it when I’m doing
other activities in Spanish. If I’m trying to watch TV in Spanish or something like that. Listen to
YouTube videos, I feel that my oral comprehension has really boosted in the last couple of months as
well, which I think is hugely down to that as well.
Lynn is asking a very pertinent question. I know the answer to the first one. I’m not entirely sure
about the the second one. Are the keys in the language you’re learning on in English? No. So if it’s in
English or for me it would be in French. OK, so for me, the platform is in French and the target
language is in Spanish. Can you change between both? I don’t believe you can. Laura, can you?
I I don’t think so. I’m not a professional so that is a really interesting question that I will research. I’ll
look into it and I’ll let you know, but I don’t think that you can. Although actually I can change my
native language to English, so I suppose in theory yes, you could just go and change your native
language and then do it in the language I think actually in theory you probably could do.
It, But I’m not a 100% sure. I would have to look into it for you.
And for me, the reason why I really, really like this platform and again we’re not here to promote it
for any financial gain. The reason why I really like it is because for us it takes a couple of boxes for us.
It adds the variety to the blended learning approach that we keep talking about. And secondly, it is
really helping our learners with confidence building. So that’s why I really, really like it. And I and I
agree with you, Lynn, just reading your comment in the early stages, do it in your language, you
know 100%. It is also why when people join our programme, we give them unlimited access for the
first two weeks of the programme. Because we really want, we really asked them to get into a little
routine of using it. It’s proven to be really effective when people use it every day or every other day.
We did. Laura picked a lot of students and she did loads of trials to see what was working best and as
a result, OK, some of our students love it. So they just use it, they have a membership every month,
some students had tried it and weren’t so keen but what we have found is just to use it in this short
compact time of two weeks before this cyber language programmes was working wonders. That’s
what we’ve now incorporated it into the Ambition Programme and again for some students they
carry on using it after because it’s really their thing. But all of them start with this. It’s really, really
good. Do you have any questions for Laura around the platform? No. So if I can just briefly
summarise all we’ve spoken about today, we really spoke about all the tools that we looked at on
day one, two, three, and four and the planning to help you to be confident learners confidence
definitely be the keyword. And obviously in this session we looked at various ways of getting you to
be confident in that language. I think we’ve agreed that this is a very inner, deeper personal feeling
and we’re not all going to find the answers in the right thing, but we talked about a safe and
comfortable environment. We talked about structure, we talked about getting out of our comfort
zone. We talked about having the right environment. We talked about daring. We talked about
finding a community connections with people and finding a language buddy. OK. And we could take a
few minutes if Gina wanted to answer Lynn’s question. So Lynn says it’s not about the platform, but
I’d love to know how Gina stays motivated with all the languages that she is learning. Gina, would
you like to answer that?
Well, most of my languages, and translator I added French because it was either French or Latin or
Greek, which Latin didn’t appeal to me or Greek either. So I was like French, OK. And Italian came
after my school. I learned that by myself. Because I was in love with an Italian guy and so you learn
language, right? And I travelled to Turkey. I liked the language and I liked the people so I just learned
that by myself. Again the same with Greek and it’s not that I don’t keep up with all of them now, but
I still can speak Italian pretty decent. My French is really rusty and basic Even thouh, it was it was
one of my favourite language. And but I’ve always also been forced I was the first one in the family to
to speak a different language. So it it always will move in somewhere. My parents they got it, took
me and shoved me there you go translate and I’m like and then we’re going to Spain and my parents
go shopping and my father just pushes me to the counter and tell them I want this cheese and I want
that cheese, I said dad, I don’t speak Spanish. I speak French.
What was your by getting out of your? Comfort zone, you know.
And I was like, so I, but I made it work between French and Italian. I made it work and the guy,
actually and I, I actually found I’m a naturally shy person until I get to know somebody. But when it’s
language, when I hear you have an accent and I’m like hello. How are you? Where you from? Ohh
that’s. It’s got such a cute accent and then I’m I get interested or I love to cook. I cook anything from
Turkish cuisine to Philippine to Japanese to Chinese to Indian and so naturally I’m curious about the
language as well. So and and that’s what motivates me is just. I’m a German, what can I say? I have
1000 projects on my plate.
And do you know Gina something which made me realise that we all have different goals when it
comes to language learning? We all have an ideal kind of level that we’d like to reach. But please do
not compare yourself to other learners, some students would rather know a little bit of a lot of
languages other people would rather just focus on one. It’s really not about comparing yourself, but
asking as you did. Lynn, you know, how do you stay motivated? I think you’ve you know, you’ve
illustrated a lot of things. We’ve spoken about dining you because, well, your dad did seem a bit cruel
to some you didn’t get you out of your comfort zone. You probably got, you know, a lot of confidence
out of that. You love to go to other people. I love the fact that you talked about. Ohh, I love cooking.
I love this. I like that brings a conversation together, Laura is right, she said accent is a point of
conversation. You know 100%, but also was quite remarkable, as you said, I am a shy person. Please
don’t ever assume that the best people in language learning are extroverts, because this is
completely different, yes. And the things though as soon as I’m talking to somebody in another
language, my shyness goes away and I have found while I can really, truly emphasise with Lynn, she
was made fun of I have only had the warmest embraces from everybody when I’m in Turkey and I
just ask for some Chai litvin and they go, Oh my God. She speaks Turkish. Blonde lady speaking
Turkish and it’s like, and they bring me gifts and and praises and food. And it’s like I can’t eat
anymore food or every house you go to, you need to eat the 10 course meal. And it’s like Oh my God.
And it’s like you just say 2 words. And they’re like, wow. And that has happened pretty much
everywhere.
A little language goes a very long way, you know when Sasha spoke about his childhood. I remember
when we used to go to France and he was younger and he would speak French to anyone around
him and quite a few times and he started to make friends and and in my parents village and and
they’ve gone round the swimming pool and all played together. And I remember a few times when a
few children went he just said that like he just said that cause he may get, he may have got the
masculine and the feminine wrong, the pronoun wrong, and the order of the pronouns in French are
hardly a walk in the park. Everyone clearly understood what he had said. He was speaking in a
perfect French accent. You could there was no hint of English too but in the way sometimes he
structured his sentences or or did a bit of english grammar with French words. You know it, it was a
little bit wobbly. And I remember children going. Hi. He just said that he just said that and I always
stood back and and observed him to see if his confidence got kind of knocked out out of that really
quite a strong willed child, which could have helped, however all he then needed to do was turn
round and speak to his brother in English, and the minute the children could see that he could look
right and speak to them in French and look left and speak to his little brother in English. That shut
them off instantly. It’s like ohh, but he can do that and we can’t so in any sometimes uncomfortable
situation. There’s always a but I can do this, but I can also do that. And you know, if you get free
food, I think it’s definitely worth getting out of your comfort zone, right? That made me wanna try
Turkishfood.
Thank you very much and I I we’re gonna finish on that. So I mean it’s wonderful, Lynn said. Gina,
you’re my inner chatterbox. See, I think you two could definitely power up and be language buddies. I
think that would work very well. So ladies, thank you very much for for having been here today. It
was a real pleasure. We’ll be here again tomorrow. And again I will reiterate what I said yesterday.
This is a nine day French master class. The first few days were, you know, a great deal of content into
learning strategies and planning. From today until the end, it’s a lot more of open discussion of
sharing stories, and if you feel that now you’ve got the right tools to go away and learn French on
your own or whatever you are already currently doing, then that’s absolutely great. I appreciate your
time. You do not have to come back. We will start to talk to you in a little bit more details about our
French ambition programme very briefly. The French ambition programme is a 12 month programme
to learn French on your way to French bilingualism whatever that term means to you, it’s very much
bridging the gap between app and self study and casual learning and part time or full time language
courses. OK, it’s very much in the middle it’s a lifestyle programme it’s a serious hobby but it isn’t self
study and just looking at something a few hours a week and it suddenly isn’t part time or full time.
OK, we expect you to have a life outside of that programme, but it does give you a lot of resources
and a lot of support and it completely plays on the strength of blended learning which we have
spoken about so many times over the course of a year, you will have 150 hours of learning. That’s our
aim for you that those hours will be divided between small group classes one-on-one and self study
material. So you’re gonna have an awful lot of resources and people that you can tap into. OK, but
we’ll talk a little a bit more about it tomorrow. We can send you information if you like. Tomorrow is
all about interacting with students, so we’ve invited Matt. Matt is a great French student who’s been
in the Academy for, I think about six months and we love the story that he has, we love the story that
he shares because he has told us many times that he thought at school that he could never learn
French, that it wasn’t for him until at an adult age. I think he’s 40 years young. He decided that he
absolutely loved France and he made a real commitment to learn the language and potentially
buying the property out there. But he’s got a really great story to tell, so we’ve invited him. I invited
other students as well, so they can all share their stories with you and you will be very welcome to
ask them questions as well. So we went a little bit over today by 10-15 minutes, but I think it was
very, very worth it. It was lovely to hear all your, all your wonderful stories. And as always, if you have
any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out personally. So thank you very much. Have a
wonderful end of the week and I’ll see you tomorrow. Take care. See you.