The British Academy

Hi there !

My name’s Jeanette, I’m English and I’m a qualified teacher of English as a foreign language with 15 years’ experience of working in various English language schools in countries around the world including England, Japan, New Zealand and of course Brazil.

I’d like to offer you a few suggestions about some things to consider when thinking about studying English abroad. I’ll start with one suggestion and in further articles I’ll add some more.

Firstly, lots of schools have the option of full-time or

part-time courses (although many schools only have full-time courses on offer). Full-time often entails morning and afternoon classes whereas part-time will probably be mornings only.

In my experience I have found that those students studying full-time inevitably don’t have enough free-time to do everything that they’d like to do – they don’t have time to study enough to be able to follow their lessons at school and they miss out on visiting all the interesting places around them and end up feeling guilty that they haven’t been able to make the most of their visit.

I strongly recommend that you seriously consider a part-time course – at first you may think “but I want to study hard and work hard on improving my English” – well this is exactly what you can do if you do a part-time course (and you’ll save money too !?!!).

Imagine a 3-hour English lesson! – how much new vocabulary, expressions, grammar, prepositions, etc do you think the teacher might introduce ? and how much of it will you remember completely and be able to use correctly following the lesson ? Extremely little of it probably!?!!

What you need is time on your own to look back at what you’ve been studying and check that you really understand it, to memorize it and to practice using it. It’s not an easy task ! Now imagine a 5-hour English lesson – even more daunting. Most teachers recommend that for every one-hour lesson you have you spend one hour studying on your own.

The 3-hour English lesson is comparable to a part-time course, the 5-hour lesson is comparable to a full-time course.

But we’re not only talking about your time studying at school and at home when we talk about improving your English in another country. What about the extremely valuable lessons you can learn on the bus or in the supermarket, in the park or in the post office, in the hairdressing salon or in the ice cream parlor, let alone the extremely valuable time you’ll spend with your host family or with friends you make (as long as you talk to them in English of course!).

Believe me there are so many things you’ll want to do and so little time to do it in !

So – here’s my suggestion – do a part-time course – study at a school in the morning under the guidance of a professional who can help you with your grammar, vocabulary etc.

In the afternoons use other resources available to you. Everything will be in English – every minute you will be learning from the things around you – from the advertisements on the bus, from the TV programs, from the 2 people standing in front of you in the queue at the post office, from the signs in the museum, from the labels on the food at the supermarket etc, etc.

Go into a clothes shop and ask the assistant about sweaters for your boyfriend, ask the man in the railway station for prices and times for the buses to Cambridge, talk to the old lady in the post office waiting to post a birthday card to her grandson in Australia – it doesn’t matter at all if you don’t have a boyfriend and have no intention of buying a sweater or going to Cambridge – the important thing is that you are practicing and improving your English.

In the evenings spend time talking to your host family (again, improving your English) and studying on your own to check you’ve understood what you’ve been studying at school and to memorize some of the vocabulary, expressions, structures etc that have been introduced to you.

So many students I’ve met who are doing a full-time course end up not going to their classes in the afternoon because there are other things they would prefer to do, and as well as that have difficulties keeping up with their lessons at school because of the amount of new things being fed to them and them not having enough time to digest everything.

Think about it ! – and remember – it’s cheaper too.

Any queries – just email us at The British Academy (adm@britishacademy.com.br) and as always we’ll do our very best to help you and give you more advise and suggestions.

Happy studying !

Jeanette Sawyer Rodrigues / The British Academy Idiomas