learning management system

Rules for English Schools
There are a few things that you need to consider when deciding on rules for your English school.

There are lots of things to think about when making rules for your school.

 

In this blog, I’ll cover 5 things that every English school should think about

when making rules for class reservations. Specifically I’ll touch on what you

need to think about when making rules for when and how often students can

cancel their lesson. Also, what types of lessons they can take if they’re allowed

to take makeup lessons.

 

The answers to these questions really depend on the type of classes that you

are offering.

 

Remember, if you are too lenient, it will negatively affect your bottomline. If

you are too strict, you may scare students away.

 

A lot of what you choose to do also depends on how you market it. I’ve given a

few examples below and will touch on more on this in future blogs.

 

Here are 5 things to get you started!

 

How’s your schedule look?

 

1. Consider your schedule

 

If you’re offering more options to take makeup lessons, will you be able to

cover them?

 

Will you be opening up and offering new lessons or will they be joining lessons

that already exist?

 

If they’re able to join other classes, it might not affect anything. If you’re

creating a new class, how much will it cost you to open the new class? Is it

worth it?

 

Can you monetize it?

 

What extra value does this add for students? What is that added value worth?

For example, creating a super flexible membership level should come at a

premium.

 

How you advertise and market it is also key.

 

Premium: For the super busy businessman/woman, Mom or Dad whose

schedule often changes at the last minute due to responsibilities.

 

Basic: For those who have control over their schedule and come whenever

they want.

 

The way that you advertise and market the different membership types you

have will help your customers decide which tier they fall under. Worded

properly it will also help persuade them into buying one membership over the

other. People want to be looked at in certain ways.

 

How much time do you need to prepare for lessons?

 

2. Consider what goes into planning a lesson

 

How much time is spend tailoring lessons depending on who’s in your class?

 

This is especially important when determining the “How far in advance” rule.

 

This doesn’t affect some teachers, schools and systems.

 

How will the quality of lessons will be affected?

 

Will this reflect in my lessons?

 

How will this potentially be looked at by students? By this last question, if

you’re selling a premium lesson at a premium price and you’re allowing Jane

Doe to sign in for a lesson one minute before it starts … that isn’t going to look

like much of a premium lesson.

 

On the other hand if you’re offering a free conversation lesson, it won’t matter

as much.

 

How many students should I allow to take my class at the

same time?

 

3. Consider occupancy rates

 

Occupancy: What are the maximum number of seats in each class? How many

seats do you have to fill in order to break even?

 

If the maximum number of students per class is 4, how much profit will you

make?

 

“My two cents” tip: Do not try to pack in 10 or 12 students per class. Of course

this depends on the type of class that you’re offering.

 

Yes, there are methods and techniques to maximize student talking time in big

classes. On the other hand, the amount of quality feedback that you (or other

teachers) will be able to give them will be very limited. This does of course

depend on the type of lesson. Conversation based lessons demand more

immediate input and feedback from the teacher than a writing class (which

you can give written feedback after the class) Choose accordingly, but choose

wisely.

 

This is another example of how you might market lessons.

 

For example, “We only allow a maximum of 4 students per class in order to

maximize student talking time. We want to ensure there’s ample time to give

students immediate quality feedback.”

 

How many levels should my school have?

 

4. Consider your curriculum and level structure

 

How many levels does your school have? If you’re just starting out and offer

group classes, go lean.

 

This is an important thing to consider because if you offer makeup lessons,

you need to think about whether they’ll be too challenging.

 

If your school doesn’t have many levels, there will be more challenging going

from one level to next.

 

Generally speaking the more levels you offer, the easier the transition from

one level to the next.

 

However, keep in mind that the more levels you offer, the less likely you may

be to fill the seats until your student numbers increase.

 

The number of classes that you offer should reflect your student

demographics. In other words, how many students are false beginner,

beginner, low intermediate, etc.?

 

If you’re just opening your English school it’s wise to start with 2 or 3 levels

and tell students that you plan to add another level in “x” number of months.

 

There are many more things to consider, but these are 4 things that will get

you started when deciding whether or not students can cancel lessons.

 

pexels-pixabay-267669

High Frequency Vocabulary 

 

What things do you consider when planning a lesson or course? How useful is

 

the vocabulary you’re teaching?

 

Did you know that your students can understand 90% of English with less

 

than 12% of the average native speaker’s total vocabulary?

 

There are over 600,000 words in the English language (of course this differs

 

like everything according to which dictionary or other source you refer to)

 

That’s pretty much impossible for anybody to learn.

 

Of course, almost nobody knows all 600,000 words.

 

So, how many words do you think the average university educated

 

English speaker knows?

 

About 20,000.

 

However, in order to understand 92% of English on TV, in movies, magazines,

 

online, in books and newspapers you only need to know the top 2800.

 

Who in their right mind figured this out?

 

Well … a guy named Charlie Browne … Actually …Dr. Charlie Browne led some

 

research (you can learn more and download all of the lists yourself using the

 

links below).

 

He based it off of about 273 million words taken from a variety of British and

 

American sources.

 

They discovered that 2800 words would give you 92% coverage of general

 

English (this is known as Zipf’s Law)

 

 

Basically, Zipf’s Law states that some words are used much more frequently

 

than others.

 

 

And that the most frequent words make up a larger percentage of everything

 

we read, watch, listen to and hear.

 

 

So we often use the same words over and over again.

 

 

So what exactly is the NGSL word list?

 

The NGSL is a list of 2800 of the most frequently used words in everyday

 

English.

 

The list does not include proper nouns, numbers and dates.

 

 

The NGSL is ordered according to frequency. In other words, how often the

 

word is used throughout the English language.

 

 

This can be quite challenging for ESL and EFL students as is.

 

 

It’s a powerful tool, however we caution it should be used with thought and

 

planning.

 

Let’s look at some examples of why you need to order the words according to

 

your needs, student levels, interests, course goals, etc.

 

 

Words such as political, process and policy are all in the top 400 words.

 

 

Other words such as telephone, weather and cook are not as frequent. These

 

words are listed after the top 1000.

 

 

For beginner and low intermediate students, we don’t recommend assigning

 

vocabulary based on frequency. This is putting the cart before the horse so to

 

speak.

 

A group of experienced ESL-EFL teachers have re-ordered the NGSL wordlist

 

to make it friendlier for lower level students. We refer to it as PESL and is

 

simply the NGSL reordered to be more ESL friendly for beginner students.

 

 

This is just one example of how we are a simple and practical approach to

 

teaching and learning English.

 

Learn more about the NGSL, NGSL-s and research involving his high frequency word lists: http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/

Sushi13

Language and culture are connected at the hip, however cultural competence is often overlooked and under-covered when teaching English.

This week we will use one of our sets of flashcards to storyboard dining etiquette in a Japanese restaurant (the examples are meant to be very light and basic though we will touch on and cover cultural competence in varying degrees later on)

This blog references and uses material from the Pocket Passport storyboard library. This particular set was created to talk about and explain dining.

The example stories that I am referencing and including links to merely touch on a couple of methods to teach this lesson. There is a myriad of ways to use these flashcards.

These stories (the pre-made stories that I am using as an example) can be used by any level students. These are two examples of a very beginner and an intermediate lesson to show the level of English that might be expected and how the language can be scaffolded if teachers choose to create their own lessons (create their own vocabulary lists, scripts, listening, vocabulary and grammar exercises).

There are infinite possibilities of how and for what level classes/courses they can be used for.

Just a few examples…

For beginner level students, have them point to each card and model what the character is saying. For a warm-up to the lesson ask them to flesh the characters out. Elicit a name and basic backgrounds for each of the characters.

A few examples of some warm up questions are:

1.  What is (his/her) name?

2. Where is he/she from?

3. Why is he/she here?

4. What is he/she doing?

5. How long will he/she stay?

Brainstorm feelings, greetings and common expressions that people use in a restaurant. For lower level students it is okay to elicit it in Japanese since one of the objectives is to ask them to explain their culture and customs in English.

You should deter your students from using sweeping generalizations like, “we Japanese…” and instead teach them more common ways to introduce their understanding of their culture such as, “In Japan it’s common…” or “Some people in Japan…” etc.

Here is an example of the language we might expect to come from a low-level student. 

Here is an example of the language we might expect to come from a low- intermediate to intermediate level student. 

https://youtu.be/ORKEfA79Deg

A few sample flashcards 

Other Ideas:

– customs of dining in Japan

– comparing Japan and other countries dining etiquette

– greetings, meanings of greetings at a restaurant that serves dishes that  are not from an English speaking country

– customs and taboos of dining (from anywhere)

– conversation sketching and storytelling

Our extensive library can be used in a variety of fun and innovative ways to explain a number of things including: health and nutrition, social responsibility, environmental issues, cultural awareness, communicative competence, respect and manners as well as to build creativity and imagination with our fairytale and science fiction storyboards.

For more information email us at: info@pocketpassport.com

*Pocket Passport’s storyboard sets are made up of between 4 and 30 flashcards per set and touch on a variety of themes and topics.

**In addition to our storyboard sets we have over 2000 vocabulary building flashcards which can also be storyboarded.