Language for specific purposes in A1/A2 courses

A specialised language is a frequent request from our clients, which we understand and try to accommodate as much as possible - so that learning is not only a pleasant benefit for the students, but also a benefit for their working life and therefore a real value for the employing company.

Vocabulary specifically for your professional role 

However, this focus is not equally achievable at all language levels, due to the nature of the process of language learning and acquisition. The higher the student's level, the easier it is to integrate the specialisation into the learning process - the student has mastered the language, operates in it freely and sovereignly, and thus has the mental capacity to master not only foreign language systematics and communication, but also more intellectually demanding content and exact terminology.

Levels A1 and A2 set the following tasks for students:

• the student is introduced to a different concept of how language works (the non/existence of gender for nouns, declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, specifics of verb tenses, meaning of grammatical tenses, etc.); possible non-/similarity with the mother tongue may accelerate progress at A levels, but it is not possible to skip the "newness", as each language has its own specificities

• the student learns basic communication in the language - sentence construction in the present tense, questions and negatives, statements about past phenomena, which are followed by other possible obstacles depending on the individual language (the aforementioned declension, etc.)

Professional superstructure belongs on a solid foundation

If students want to focus on specialized language, it is absolutely necessary that the basis of the use of the foreign language is firmly built - only then can the specialized superstructure be built on top of it (as it also works in the mother tongue). If a request is made for a professional/vocational focus of lessons, we as a language school naturally do our best to comply, but our possibilities are objectively limited to a large extent. If language teaching is to have a long-lasting and sustaining effect, it is necessary to work primarily on general knowledge of the language; with (light) support, the student navigates everyday situations both productively and receptively. This skill can be supplemented by targeted vocabulary enrichment, which must be directly proportional to the student's abilities in the target language.