In this last newsletter article of the school year I want to give some advice about how students can continue to improve their English over the long summer vacation. Before doing so, however, I would like to stress that ESL students need time in the summer to completely relax from the academic pressures they have been under all year. If they are laden with extra holiday work against their will, they are unlikely to start the next school year with the renewed energy and enthusiasm that is so important to their success.
The eight week vacation is a long time, however, and it is certainly a good idea if students do not completely neglect their learning of English in this period. Most of the things that students can do I have already suggested in my November newsletter. These include grammar and vocabulary work, as well as writing and listening activities, if your child enjoys them. But most importantly, the summer is an excellent time for reading, both in English and the mother tongue. As direct preparation for the work of next year’s classes, your child could find out what topics are due to be covered in science or humanities for example, and read up about those topics in an English or native language textbook or encyclopedia. Similarly, a student doing mainstream English could find out which novels or short stories are on the curriculum for the next grade and read them in advance. Your child will also improve her English if she uses some of the long summer days to read books of her choice, both fiction and factual. Reading good books in her own language will also indirectly benefit her English development because of the transferability of skills and knowledge from the first to the second language.
Another way for a student to improve her English in the summer is to attend a vacation language course. There are hundreds of these courses on offer in the United Kingdom alone. Most summer language schools offer morning lessons followed by afternoon activities and trips. The lessons will probably focus on conversational and situational language such as discussing likes and dislikes or buying a ticket at a railway station. Typically, most of the students on the course will be of the same nationality, and accommodation is with a host family. I have had experience teaching at a couple of summer language courses and am a little reluctant to recommend them to ESL students at our school. If you choose a reputable school and are lucky enough for your child to stay with a good family, your child will learn a lot of conversational English and have an enjoyable holiday too, but in many cases the opposite could be true. It is also important to point out that your child will most likely not learn very much of the kind of English that she needs to be successful in her academic work at FIS.
If you wish your child to practise her general English in the vacation, a better choice, in my opinion, would be an activity course in a topic that she is interested in. For example, if she is interested in computers, you could send her to a computer course in England at which most of the participants will be native speakers. If she likes water sports, sign her up for a children’s activity holiday organized by a British travel company. Maybe she’s very keen on basketball; put her name down for an English language basketball camp. And so on. The advantage of all these kinds of activities is that your child will be mixing with native-speakers, not just with other English language learners, most of whom spend all of their time outside lessons speaking their own language. And at the same time she will learning new skills and enjoying herself (as compared with sitting in a hot classroom learning grammar!)
Below are a few useful web sites for choosing a suitable course or holiday for your child: