For foreign business people and professionals, the English language is often an essential tool for communication.
Lots of foreign language speakers lack sufficient proficiency with the English language and, as a result, suffer an important loss of professional effectiveness when traveling abroad on business or when receiving important visitors from around the world. They feel frustrated at not being able to convey the richness of their professional skills through a language they cannot use effectively. Your job will be to help them toward greater confidence in their ability to communicate, by exposing them to a wealth of rich speech and accents and by having them express themselves non-stop for 80 hours straight (5 days x 16 hours/day). You will not need to know or teach English grammar; this is not our objective. You will only need to talk with different people just like you'd talk to a good friend or a fun and interesting neighbour.
We want to expose our foreign national friends (Jonnys and Jonnettes) to real English. We want to introcduce them to the real McCoy. Not to the Queens English and not to a watered down, standard version of the language. Unfortunatley most English teachers do the latter and, in the end, they do their students a disservice. We will not do this to them. We will expose them to the language just as they may hear it on the streets of London, Glasgow, Dublin, Cardiff, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Cape Town, or for that matter, Sandwich, Kent.
The key words are 'operation English'. Our approach is to throw our Jonny foreign national participants into the 'deep water' of English langauge. They will at first be drowning in a 16 hour day sea of English. At first they may feel as though they aren't treading water but they will soon realise they have no choice but to perk up, wise up, and learn to tread water. By the time they leave the course though we will hope they are swimming.
Conventional language training is like learning to swim in the shallow end of the pool. The instructor holds you underneath so that you are level with the pool surface and you perform the new strokes being taught. If you flounder you don't get any water up your nose. At BlightyTown, we want them coughing up half the pool. Why? Because that's what often happens to them in real-life language situations.
In an English class, if a student makes a mistake, the teacher corrects him and that's that. It's like a flight simulator. If you crash, you don't die. However, when the Chairman of the Italian Aeronautical Association attends the bi-annual meeting in Zurich of the Pan-European Association, where he and 12 other European Chairmen must hammer out a series of grievances to hand up to the pertinent E.U. Commission in Brussels, if he doesn't follow the cross-currents of the discussion, he's dead.
He goes through an excruciating two-day experience of feeling like a complete idiot and he is out of touch with his colleagues. To top it off, he must lunch and dine with these 12 men over the two-day period, where they talk about all kinds of subjects, from their daughters' ballet lessons to the likelihood that England will win the world cup in the next 50 years. Cases like this are true, blue cockpit experiences, where if you crash, you're splattered over a 300 meter radius. Of course, we cannot totally emulate in BlightyTown such anxiety-ridden experiences, but we can come much closer to them than can be achieved in conventional English classes. Therefore, when we sell the programme to foreign nationals and their employees, we state that they will not be with professional trainers, but insist that this is exactly what they most need. And it's 100% true.
BlightyTown is a non-paid, volunteer programme where participants exchange conversation for a lovely room and hearty board in the beautiful English countryside. You will make new acquintances, enjoy new experiences and have a great time!
Are you BlightyTown material? If you're answer is YES to the following questions, we welcome you to experience the five most memorable days of your life!
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