English Language Courses

Non-English Mother Tongue Candidates

Duration:

10 to 12 weeks

The objective is to develop the candidates’ English language comprehension and speaking ability. Improvement in English reading and writing will be a product of improved English comprehension and speaking standards.

An important part of the program will involve external visits. These will include both cultural and business visits. Emphasis will be placed on visits to oil and gas industry related companies.

A relatively low Trainer-Student ratio will permit the use of seminar type tuition with maximum student participation. Particular emphasis will be given to oral work and comprehension. It is anticipated that the students will have some facility in reading and writing english and this will be developed further in the light of modern idiom met in the living language.

The use of modern teaching aids will be combined with well established traditional methods, sometimes neglected in ‘modern’ teaching.

Teaching will be in English.

Specific methods which have been successful and popular in past
courses to foreign pupils would include:-

- Dealing with any points arising from the previous day’s tuition
- General conversation on a prepared theme
- Individual talks with open class discussion
- Role play
- Aural comprehension
- Analysis of pre-recorded videos of current events, news, course related materials, oil related topics etc
- Study of newspaper and magazine articles
- Daily use of a professional English course, with audio tapes
- The use of educationally suitable games such as crosswords, scrabble etc.
- Use of video camera and playback. This has been particularly useful in previous courses where presentation has been important.

Students will be assessed on arrival. This will involve oral, aural and written tests and will provide a useful guide on the level at which to begin. Further assessment will take place half way through the course and at the end. Each candidate will sit an external exam at the end of the course to obtain his International Certificate.

There will be seven (7) hours of formally structured tuition each day, 35 hours per week. This will include an hour of supervised written work at the end of the day. This has proved far superior to setting written work for the next day, where mistakes tend to become entrenched before correction.

A typical day’s timetable would be:-

08:00 hrs – 09:00 hrs
Points from previous day’s lessons, question and answer sessions

09:00 hrs – 10:00 hrs
General conversation on a prepared theme

10:00 hrs – 12:00 hrs
Video reviews

12:00 hrs – 13:00 hrs
Lunch

13:00 hrs – 14:30 hrs
English Course with audio tapes

14:30 hrs – 16:00 hrs
Writing session with personal tuition – a time for dealing with individual points and problems. Experience has shown this to be an appropriate way of winding down the day.

The above study format is based on successful experience of teaching non English mother tongue students in Eastern Europe, Russia and Libya. The key to its success is a low student/instructor ratio.