There are many many universities, language schools or other institutions providing language courses or any other kind of language training. And nearly all these providers of language training may change the content of its courses, the teachers and the staff frequently. A course that had been excellent in the last year may be rather mediocrate this year because simply the teacher moved or the school is recruiting a different level of students. In this situation it's for an International Programs Office not possible to give a serious advise or recommendation for some language schools.
Nevertheless we may provide some criteria for choosing a school and we may share our experiences with language providers.
Criteria for a language school: a) a good language school offers various levels of language courses in paralell and will insist on a language test to find the adequate course level for you. b) a good language school will provide all the relevant information about the classes like the minimum and maximum of participants, the age of the participants, the nationalities of the learners etc. Good schools will offer a mixed learning situation related to nationality, gender, age etc. c) a good language school will have a certain quota of permanent staff and teachers. Here the school will be proud to introduce the quality and academic background of the language teachers and will also highlight since how long teachers are working with the school. d) a good school will have adequate facilities (classrooms, equipment, self learning places, lounges etc.) and will be proud to show it.
In general we recommend language courses within a university or affiliated (for example as institute) to a university. The more prestigious the university is, the less this university will offer lousy classes, that may ruin the reputation on the long run. In case you found a specific language school that may fit to your needs it's also recommended to "google" on that name and maybe you will find some helpful comments in newsrooms. For more traditional private language school you may check also the LanguageCourse.net website (though the listing there is not a quality indicator).
Of course for someone looking for a good language school the remarks on the diversity and quality of the language providers are maybe helpful, but quite often not sufficient. For this reason we list below some schools or agents that we found good or supportive; this list is quite often based on the feedback we got from our students and/or special recommendations that we got. |
