[About ILC]
Our Mission
The conversation courses featured here at ILC implement a method that I like to call a "gradual immersion-orientation."
Most language instruction implements immersion-based learning (if at all) in a way that, at best, does little to help new language learners pick up the language, and may even complete discourage them to the point of walking away from their target language, at worst.
Immersion-oriented language learning, rather, focuses on what is undoubtedly the most important element to learning a foreign language: comprehensible input. It challenges learners to take guided lesson and couple them with new lifestyle practices that center around exposure to and interaction within the language they wish to learn, on an everyday basis and at the level that's most appropriate for them.
One can amount conventional immersion-based learning methods to teaching someone how to swim by throwing them into the deep end of the swimming pool: they are extremely unlikely to succeed and are even liable to drown without help from the teacher. While the intention of doing away with the floaties is admirable and not unfounded, it fails to meet the learner where they are in the language learning process.
Through immersion-oriented learning, however, one still does without the floaties while coming to understand the water by successively upgrading over time from the shallow end to deeper and deeper levels. In language learning terms, this means that learners come to know the rhythms and patterns of the language through consistent, regular exposure to it while also interacting through it with their language guide or instructor, as well as media consumption and independent project creation.
Put differently, ILC prioritizes comprehension (understanding of material) over production (being able to reproduce it oneself), enabling greater retention and faster progress than otherwise.
In a way not unlike how babies and children learn their first language, learners will learn foreign languages through exposure, enjoyment, and intrigue, while also taking advantage of the knowledge of their first language to open up the doorways to a new one.
Our Teachers
