Methodology

Centro Glass de Idiomas has always strived to offer cutting-edge and innovative teaching methods since 1995. The institution has abandoned more traditional methodologies, in particular those that favour excessive grammar studies and the exhaustive repetition of structures. Our underlying principle is a holistic language approach, following the natural order of language acquisition. Our lessons are taught in such a way as to cater for student’s different learning channels – visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic.

We understand that each student must be treated as an individual, since each one of them has their own learning style. Therefore, the group’s pace and needs are considered by their teachers and lessons are shaped accordingly.

Our classes’ timetable consists of 50-minute classes per week so that our students are regularly exposed to content throughout the week, facilitating the language acquisition process.

Second language acquisition process is similar to first language acquisition. Thus, the closer we get to the way a child learns, the easier the process gets. At first, our students are stimulated to experience concrete daily language, similar to the language that we use with babies and young children. At this point, explicit grammar is not introduced. We focus on short, complete and contextualized structures through TPR (Total Physical Response) with simulation of several concrete situations in the classroom. In addition, there are also short stories, poems, and jazz chants (rhythmic structures in which students practice meaningful and complete structures). Our lessons are very dynamic and there are tasks and games that stimulate our students’ memory and creativity, crucial aspects in the learning process of another language.

In the following levels, we use the Task-based approach whose main goal is to encourage students to produce and present a certain project or task using English throughout the process, as well as in the final presentation. Grammar analyses appear as the teacher notices problems in the students’ presentations. That way, the teacher is able to manage classroom exposure time in a more efficient way.

On the whole, our lessons reflect the following principles:

• activities focus first on the ability to listen and read and, then, encourage the ability to speak and write;
• knowledge about language (its structure, grammar) must only be developed when students are able to produce it (remember that we only study our own grammar when we go to school and, at this point, we can already speak our mother tongue reasonably well);
• beginner students must be exposed to concrete language;
• the pace of each student / group must be respected;
• emphasis on the development of comprehensive vocabulary from the first lessons.

All teachers from Glass School are qualified to implement the basic principles that govern our teaching philosophy. Weekly, it is held in-service trainings with our teachers in order to read and discuss academic articles, share experiences, and find solutions to possible classroom problems.