“Some people want to study English – most people want to learn to speak it. That’s why there’s Speak Your Mind.”
Used by tens of thousands of learners in mono-lingual and multi-lingual situations since its initial development in the mid nineteen-nineties, Speak Your Mind is a real alternative to conventional English teaching programmes. Based on the Structured Interaction Method, Speak Your Mind proves reliable, effective and popular with a wide range of learners, specifically in situations where they have limited lesson-time and self-study time.
Speak Your Mind is results-orientated but keeps the individual at the centre of the process. Enjoyment plays an important part in successful learning and Speak Your Mind lessons allow plenty of space for fun, but ultimately students will evaluate a course on the results they achieve. Speak Your Mind enables students to see constant tangible evidence of their progress – another major factor in creating the strong sense of reward that both students and teachers gain.
The Speak Your Mind course follows a clear structure: most people intuitively approve of going from A to B to C. Learners like to ‘know what they are learning’ and to ‘know what they know’ – for many people this is an essential aid in maintaining motivation and to keep studying towards long-term goals.
“After all the times I’ve tried to learn English this is the first time I actually enjoy it and the first time I see I’m getting somewhere.”(Satoshi Kamura: Surgeon, Japan)
ENGLISH WITH SPEAK YOUR MIND - Intermediate
ENGLISH WITH SPEAK YOUR MIND - Elementary
Emphasis on speaking
Widely accessible learning for ages 11 to 87
Reliable: proven internationally over twenty years
Clear structure for lesson-to-lesson progress
Effective and relevant from beginner to advanced level
No compulsory home-study
For groups and 1-to-1 courses
Rather than create situations from which new language may or may not emerge, the teacher introduces ‘language’ and then creates around it a series of accessible conversational contexts through questions and cues that are used as the basis of teacher-student and student-student interaction. The guided dialogue has a dual role – the questions are genuine enquiries which provoke real answers from students, and they are also focused ‘language-learning’ opportunities. Most learners are likely to be more interested in ‘ordering a coffee’ than, for example ‘the indefinite article’ (even though they know it’s important) so the content is designed to raise and maintain student engagement and to trigger natural spontaneous interaction.
Motivation – learning in action
The design of the teaching material assures that lessons are always accessible to learners, yet at the same time can push at the edges of their knowledge and skills. In the classroom the intuition and response-ability of the teacher will play the balance between learners’ sense of reward from what they can now do well and the challenge of learning more. The guided dialogue constitutes the core activity of the lesson, typically making up around 80% of lesson-time, and is the platform for developing listening skills, fluency and accuracy. It’s a learning-rich lesson – the teacher manoeuvres the dialogue through a wide variety of topics and contexts and can draw in a wide range of vocabulary and grammar each lesson – especially valuable where learning-time is limited and when students may have little or no exposure to English outside class.
“Simplicity is a good thing. We look for simplicity in the things that we use and in the things we have to do, so when learning with Speak Your Mind comes across as ‘simple’ that is to its real credit.” Iain McInally
Speak Your Mind approaches learning as a single on-going ‘process’ rather than a series of separate ‘episodes’. New language is given a clear and compact introduction. This initial contact simply starts the learning process – a process that will carry on as students use the new language in a variety of new contexts over time, both through in-built Review and on-going re-cycling that is woven into the teaching material throughout the course. Learning is not a neat regular process, but these multiple encounters with words and structures over time, in an increasingly wide range of situations and associations, get the memory really working.
We don’t claim any magic formula but Speak Your Mind is designed to be efficient as well as effective. Although learning times can vary considerably from individual to individual and from region to region, in most cases Speak Your Mind significantly reduces learning time, offering students the benefit of a course where ‘learning fast’ and ‘learning well’ are not alternatives.