The Let’s practise and speak project for schools is taking off.

European School works first and foremost with professionals and companies that use foreign languages — and English in particular — as their working languages for doing business. The European School method is firmly geared towards practising the language, towards using it concretely in real working and personal situations. It is precisely this focus on hands-on learning of a foreign language and on the ability to hold a conversation that gave rise to the Conversation Class, free sessions held at European School centres where you can spend an hour talking with a native-speaker teacher and gauge your own speaking level.

Alongside professionals and companies, from 2016 European School is going into schools, where students have the interest — but above all the need — to learn English in a practical way, with a greater focus on conversation. As is well known, English is studied for around 10 years at school, yet by the end of their school career students still do not speak it and would not be able to use it for work. It therefore becomes essential to start as early as possible on a different kind of learning from the classroom one — not a replacement for it but a complement to it, aimed more squarely at fluency and speaking; the kind of learning that the European School method captures with its “Learning by doing” inspiration.

Last Tuesday – 18 October – Dr Arianna Fanani, director of the European School centre in Lucca, held a meeting at the former school in Torre, a locality in the hamlet of San Martino in Freddana. In front of some twenty parents and primary and lower-secondary school students from the municipality of Pescaglia, she set out in detail the “Let’s practise and speak” project, whose aim is to strengthen the learning of spoken language.

Also taking part in the meeting was Carolyn Travers, a native-speaker teacher at European School in Lucca, who explained the course content and the teaching methodology used to engage the youngsters and get them speaking English.

Download here the presentation of the project.