Viewpoints
“We have said for years that this type of educational service has been missing from Hungary” Mark Davies, interim Principal of an international school in Budapest
“ELC’s attention to getting the well qualified and experienced staff will make a big difference in children’s progress” David Clapp, former Principal of Britannica and Department Head at the British International School Budapest (BISB)
“The foundation teacher is not just an excellent teacher, but has real pedagogical skills. Both his personal and your entire school's approach towards the students and teaching English, is something that makes your institution really valuable”. Kinga Pall, mother of Beni aged 6.
“The results that the ELC teachers achieved just in a few month time, was much more than I ever expected. Hanna enjoys going to ELC, even after her long hours in the local Hungarian school. She never ever wanted to miss a class in ELC as she loves learning English”. Read more Kiss Katalin, mother
Courses
Assessing my child
Children will be put into different groups dependent on a combination of their current language and literacy skills as well as other learning factors such as their age and social development. In order to assess your child’s current ability, your child will be invited for a half an hour meeting where one of our teachers can understand their current level of English ability. This is normally done verbally and depending on ability a short written assessment will be completed. The teacher can then also discuss your objectives for your child’s development and what standards you would like them to achieve within what timeframe. The teacher will then be able to recommend the appropriate programme.
Programmes offered
Groups will be a maximum of 10 children. Classes will be from 14.00 to 16.00 and from 16.00 to 18.00 each weekday afternoon. All the children attend classes twice per week for a total of four hours. This is equivalent to one lesson per day at a daytime school which is sufficient to ensure progress. Times maybe adjusted slightly to suit the needs of individual groups.
Literacy programme: This course is designed for those children who are already able to read and write the top 100 “fast” words and are familiar with the sounds of all the letters and the combinations of letters. These are referred to as the 44 basic phonemes. Typically these children can already speak conversational English. Students follow key stage 1 and key stage 2 of the English National curriculum on this programme, as they would do if they attended school in the England.
Foundation programme: This has been designed for those students that do not meet the criteria above for the Literacy programme. Often these students do not speak any English or if they speak English, they do not know their phonemes which are the basis for reading and writing. After 12 to 18 months, students should be able to progress from this course and onto the Literacy programme.
School Resources
ELC uses all the latest technology and resources to aid learning and make the classrooms as fun as possible. We use iPads, interactive computer whiteboards, e books and lots of educational software. The interactive computer whiteboard allows children to move letters, words and objects around a big white screen. The children are fascinated by their ability to change the order of letters, to link words with objects and to play numerous letter and word games. We also have a large levelled reading library and a wide range of books for the children to choose and take home.
Curriculum and learning areas
The curriculum is based on the English National curriculum. During each school year students will work with different strategies to make the required progress in the 11 key learning areas. The curriculum is centred around 11 key learning and development areas:
- Speaking
- Listening and responding
- Group discussion and interaction
- Word recognition: decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling)
- Word structure and spelling
- Understanding and interpreting texts
- Engaging and responding to texts
- Creating and shaping texts
- Text structure and organisation
- Sentence structure and punctuation
- Presentation