Learning a language can be a bit like going on a journey to somewhere you’ve never been before – you don’t know exactly what (or who) you’ll encounter on the way or how long it’s going to take you to get there. It can also be quite expensive.
Yes, you can use apps and online resources. You can also find some online courses (and even face-to-face ones) which, as we say in the UK, are as cheap as chips. But I can guarantee that if your lessons are that cheap your teacher is being underpaid, even exploited.
At Red Brick we understand that it’s not always easy to make the ethical choice – we certainly don’t have the resources to fork out lots of money for our own language learning. However, we also appreciate that our language learning is a choice, this is probably not the case for most people learning English.
We also appreciate we all have busy lives and most people don’t have lots of spare time to spend in a class learning a language. So our courses are designed to limit the time spent in class while maximising your learning. The Flipped Classroom technique can help with this.
In a Flipped Classroom you complete ‘pre-class tasks’ to prepare for the next lesson. This might be brainstorming ideas with your classmates, reading an article and answering questions, learning some vocabulary or watching a video. Class time is then devoted to helping you express your ideas and opinions. This saves you money, makes you a more independent learner and the teacher can focus on more difficult tasks in class. It also makes our courses more flexible – you can read that article or watch that short video on the way to work!
Check out the info-graphic below for some of the benefits of the Flipped Classroom.
Vocabulary you may need some help with:
- encounter – meet, come across someone or something
- For children who encounter educational difficulties we have the services of our Learning Support Department. (Source:BNC)
- Birds occasionally encounter bad weather, but usually they are successful at predicting favourable conditions. (Source:BNC)
- (as) cheap as chips – very cheap, very inexpensive (British English – informal)
- It really works, it’s brilliant and it’s cheap as chips. (Source: The Sunday Times: 2013)
- exploited – treated unfairly for someone else’s advantage
- Are these kids con artists, or are they being exploited? (Source:ICHACHA)
- New immigrants are usually the most exploited people in the city. (Source:ICHACHA)
- fork out – pay for something unwillingly (informal, phrasal verb)
- Taxpayers fork out more money than ever. (Source:ICHACHA)
- American airports generally make passengers from around the world $3 apiece to push around their own luggage. (Source:ICHACHA)
- Sources:
- BNC – a carefully-selected collection of 4,124 contemporary written and spoken English texts, primarily from the United Kingdom. http://phrasesinenglish.org/searchBNC.html
- ICHACHA – a web dictionary with examples of real language usage. https://eng.ichacha.net/ee/
- The Sunday Times – a British based newspaper. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/
- Sources:
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