Fundación San Pablo Castilla y León CEU

This university in Valladolid offers courses in Spanish for international students. Courses range in price form €450 for a month to €2000 for the spring session, lasting from January to May. It is also possible to have private lessons at €30.00 per hour.
If you enrol for one of their longer Spanish courses, you have two possibilities for accommodation. You can either stay in a university residence or you can stay with a local family. The latter is probably more demanding, but it does mean that you will get a flavour of the real Spain and ample opportunity to practise the new language that you are learning.
Valladolid anyway is a fascinating town with its fair share of history and a vibrant night-life. Although it is a small town it has all the facilities of the larger cities. To help you to make the most of this, the university offers a leisure programme to complement its language lessons.
This is definitely worth a look if you are interested in going on a residential Spanish course.

A New Vision for Bridge House Languages

I have taken this back over now. It is my intention to run the whole enterprise now as something which makes a little money for me, as a site which celebrates what can be done in learning languages and as a place where those who wish to learn languages can meet those who wish to teach them.
I am not going to spend all of my time, as I did previously, in admin concerned with matching tutors with clients. This has to become an automatic process, so that people want to come to the web site and so that tutors want to register.
I shall offer training and networking opportunities, links and advertising.
Any other ideas are certainly welcome.

A Great Advantage of Being Competent in Another Language

My cousin was over from France this weekend. She speaks fluent French, though she’s got to do that through living there not through a formal education like I have. It doesn’t actually matter what route you get there by. But we’re both fluent and can read as easily in French as we can in English.
Being able to read like that means that there is some literature we can access that other people can’t. Not much is translated into English. Those who only speak English therefore, see very little of the forms of literature, different form our onw, which are available in other languages.
For example, Olivier Adam in his book “On Ira Voir la Mer », Paris, Médium, 2002, really gets into the mind of a delinquent like nobody else does. Hervé Jaouen’ s “Mamie Mémoire”, Paris Gallimard, 1999, explores what it is like living with a relation who has Alzheimer’s . Then there is the format of book produced in Belgium which is just not known here : the hard-back picture book / graphic novel written for young adults which contains a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, for example: Guibert, Emmanuel and Didier Lefèvre, « Le Photographe Tome1 ». Dupuis: Fleurus, 2003. All of Amélie Nothomb’s work is extraodinary and also unfortunately not translated.
There are of course also examples in Spanish and German and no doubt in several other languages I don’t speak. What a wealth of thought we miss out on by being monoglot, and monglot at that in such a dominant language.
See also my Ph D thesis « Peace Child, Towards a Global Definition of the Young Adult Novel ».

Lifelong Learning at University – a Fantastic Opportunity at a Spanish University, Universidad Pablo de Olavide

Lifelong Learning at University – a Fantastic Opportunity at a Spanish University

These are courses for students who wish to learn their language in a university setting. There does tend to be more rigour in these courses and a faster pace than those in Adult Education Centres, so they are not for the faint-hearted.
The programme lasts from Monday to Friday over two weeks and covers:-
Spanish Grammar and Practice
Writing and Comprehension
Oral Expression and Comprehension.
Options are:-
Spanish Pronunciation Workshop
Spanish for Cinema
Spanish for Business
Preparation for the DELE exam
Shorter one-week courses are also available.
A distinct advantage of these courses is that you are in the country whose language you are learning. You have the option of staying with a Spanish host family – very good value at €600 for a month or €150 a week. This is bound to add to the experience. But wherever you pick your accommodation – whether with a host family, in the university residences or in a local hotel, it’s certainly not a bad place to study. The university is situated in the beautiful city of Seville.

Creativity in Foreign Language Learning
It isn’t actually difficult, though people think it is. It’s really a question of being willing to give it a go and make the most of what you do know. That is where I put the emphasis when I’m teaching Creative Writing in other languages. When you first learn a new language, you do actually go quite slowly and often have the feeling that you are not really learning much. It’s often a case of thinking in a different way and it’s certainly a matter of thinking outside the box. Play with the language. Borrow something from another unit. Mix and match. Stretch your imagination. Ask yourself, what do I know that I can use here?

War with Troy: The Story of Achilles

War with Troy: The Story of Achilles
This is really a resource for primary school teachers for use in the English curriculum. Yet it can be of great use to all teachers of English as a Foreign Language, as it set out to practise all of those skills with which we are so familiar: listening, speaking, reading, writing. It also includes that one that we are never so sure of: creativity.
You can buy the three CDs for £25.00. The teacher’s guide costs £29.50. This contains:
• episode-by-episode teaching notes
• story summaries, ideas for starting points and multiple suggestions for follow-up activities
• mapping to National Literacy Strategy, including storytelling, features of myths, presentation of characters, and oral and written storytelling
• mapping to the Speaking, Listening, Learning strategy, including ideas for listening, speaking, group discussion and drama
• advice on planning lessons around speaking and listening
• a full transcript of the storytellers' story
• photocopiable illustrations.
Similar materials for the “Return from Troy” are also available.
It is also well worth visiting the web sit and listening to the free materials and looking at sample teacher’s resources.
This is a wonderful story, beautifully retold by professional story-tellers, Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden.