The teaching curriculum in your school must be based on a single, major thing: the target, defined by meeting of the final requirements, set by you, your methodologist and teacher for your course participants. Only when you define the foregoing, you can set out to prepare the content, i.e. educational materials and their potential breakdown into particular stages or classes.
Here are a few guidelines that might help in development of the teaching curriculum in your language school:
- Don’t believe that it suffices to create a few universal teaching curricula that can be used permanently depending, e.g. on the age group or learning level. If you want to stand out and be effective at the same time, you should each time analyse carefully the profiles, interests and needs of your students (perhaps some interesting survey might be useful during signing up for a course – this is also a good marketing element for a language school, strengthening customers’ feelings that we are interested in their needs: they reckon with me, so they will teach me what I need to know).
- A foreign language course needs to set for itself ambitious, but attainable targets. Do not promise you will teach someone to speak in three months; otherwise you will be accused of incompetence. You had better talk about effects that can be achieved after a specific period of learning. For example: Are you getting ready for holidays in Paris? With us you will learn the basics of linguistic savoir-vivre in one month! Learn how to order frog’s legs, ask how to get to Louvre or do shopping at Champs-Élysées … When methodology is well-chosen, a month of well-planned, intensive summer holiday course will suffice to train the suggested skills. And the offer sounds interesting…
- Don’t be afraid to give up on certain things if the course’s goal rules them out. In the traditional versions of language courses it is unthinkable to leave out elements of phonetics and pronunciation practice. But if you offer, for example, a course in business or legal correspondence, it does not make sense to waste time for practicing of pronunciation. Student came to learn how to formulate written application, create documents, edit replies.
- Sometimes you need to say no, event to a teacher, is spite of that fact that the latter will insist: but this is so important! Certainly so, but you have specific time available, you have specific targets and your customers have paid specific money to complete your course having specific knowledge. Overloading of the curriculum brings the risk of poor learning results and lack of customer satisfaction even if the teachers work to the best of their skills and abilities.
When you determine teaching curricula, it is worthwhile being honest to be effective. Unfulfilled promises may only bring damages, from customers’ dissatisfaction, through teachers’ frustration to failure of the entire school. Ensure satisfaction of your students through well-chosen teaching material, diversified exercises and proper scheduling of the course and definition of its duration.