One of my deepest wishes for my clients is that they are able to learn independently of me.  Learning a language is a life-long task and therefore learners need to develop skills and strategies to support them on this journey.  However, it is challenging to make space and time for this.  I know myself that my Chinese language lessons seem to come around very quickly and I have never done all of my homework before I meet my teacher on a Tuesday!  Therefore, in my three-month and year-long courses, I have included one Extended Study Week each month.

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These Extended Study Weeks are intended to open up some space and time for you to achieve something bigger and more challenging in English than you might be able to do in one week.  They are designed to push your ability to work independently and to develop greater resilience towards your language learning.  They give you the opportunity to dig into something that really interests you, or to take on a larger, more complex homework assignment than you normally do.

 

For the Extended Study Weeks, we will agree a suitable task or tasks for you to complete before our next lesson.  These could be things like:
 

• researching a topic and preparing a presentation for your next class

• completing a full mock test for your exam

• writing, re-drafting and sending your resume for a job interview

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There will be no one-to-one meeting in the Extended Study Week.  Instead, you will have unlimited feedback on your task throughout the week.  For example, if you are making a presentation, you might send me a voice recording of part of the presentation.  I can then listen to the recording, and send you a voice memo back with feedback and ideas for upgrading your work.  This process can be repeated as many times as you wish during the Extended Study Week, meaning that by the time we meet, your presentation will already be at a high standard and you will have solved many of the problems by yourself. 

 

This makes the Extended Study Weeks a proactive way of developing your language rather than relying on a retroactive method of feedback and correction after a task has been completed.