Intensive General English

At BROWNS, we have a really really special Intensive General English programme. Essentially what we do is, we divide the classes into CORE Classes, Active8 Classes and Accelerate Further Learning. So it's called BROWNS Active8 Accelerate Learning Programme. Essentially in the morning, you have one teacher - Monday to Friday, and you focus on course book based class so we use something like this in our classes. And in the morning class, we have an integrated syllabus where we look at listening, speaking, reading, writing, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and functional usage. Functional usage is, "How do I complain about my coffee in a coffee shop?" And if you want to be a fluent user of English, you need presentation and practice of all of these areas. So, some students, they might have really beautiful speaking fluency but their accuracy is not correct, and that is because they are not looking at vocabulary and grammar and all of these other areas that feed in. So at BROWNS we focus on Active8, the four skills and the four systems that make up English. Every Monday, in your class, in the second hour, you will have a Revision test. So this checks your previous week's learning. So It's not meant to be a scary test, it's meant to be another learning tool for you to see, "have I understood what happened in class".In the third hour every Monday, we mark the test together, as a class. So it's your chance to ask more questions like, "I didn't understand that area about present perfect, please explain it again". So that's the core class in the morning.

In the afternoons, we have our Active8 Afternoon Program. So this is where we put you into different skills and systems based classes, depending on your level. So, for example, your grammar level might be B1, but your listening level might be C1. So we will put you into two different classes. We wrote this whole syllabus based on the Common European Framework (CEF). So the CEF says that language learners of any nationality have certain characteristics and certain language levels from A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 to C2. So that's how we divide you into our skill classes in the afternoon. So on a Monday afternoon, you look at pronunciation, Tuesday you go into Vocabulary and reading, Wednesday is writing, Thursday is one hour of grammar and one hour of functional usage, and Friday is listening and speaking. So that really helps you push that area where you might be a little bit weak and improve the areas where you are already strong.

Then, we have BROWNS Accelerate Further Learning Programme. So, for this we use BROWNS passport system . Now, imagine that there is an area of your learning that you might have missed out on or you might be particularly weak but no body else in your class is. So every Monday during that test, your teacher collects your BROWNS passport and writes advice particular to you for you to study during Accelerate that week. Each day, for one hour, you go to the Accelerate Further Learning Programme and focus on this area that the teacher has asked you to do. The next week, your teacher then checks your passport, and makes sure that you've followed the advice and then gives you more advice so that you improve really, really quickly.

The BROWNS Core programme is 10 weeks. So we actually have an English Level Guarantee that says that you will move up a level in 10 weeks if you follow our work and do your homework and go to Accelerate. We also give you a workbook so you can study at home and it comes with a Multi ROM so that you can do extra practice as well whenever you want to. It has really good activities on it as well as other listening material.

So that's the BROWNS General English Programme.