Our Lessons
What can you expect in the classroom?
There are students from many different countries in our group courses and this makes our classes even more interesting. Teachers speak solely in Czech from the first lessons on. You don't have to worry, though. They speak slowly, use simple words and incorporate pictures and miming. This helps the student practice listening and comprehension; they learn to focus on the sound of the language and lose the fear of not understanding every single word.
We try to create a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere in all of our courses. We don't want our students to feel worried or stressed out. We want them to really get to know and become comfortable with Czech culture and customs.
Our goal is not to teach perfect grammar, but instead to help our students get around and be understood. When someone makes a mistake, it's not a big problem. We want our students to speak as much as possible in class – they talk in pairs, groups, and with the teachers. They complete tasks together, solve problems, play games, describe pictures and practice dialogues. Traditional fill-in-the-gap or transform-the-sentence exercises are kept to a minimum in class as we believe they are best done as homework for self-study. And at the Caledonian School, there are no translation exercises.
In the first two semesters, we try to teach students how to react. There is little grammar presentation as students learn with the help of analogies. The aim is to learn to react in everyday situations.
Grammar structures are studied in more detail in subsequent semesters. Students who continue with lessons past this point are usually very interested in the Czech language and so are motivated to invest more time and energy into learning this challenging language. At this level, they need to systematize and broaden their knowledge and courses are thus more theoretical. But of course, we're constantly trying to make learning interesting and fun.