Faq Reference Data Information

Once upon a time there was a happy balance between the agents and the language schools. The agents provided admission services and translations and the schools taught the students. The average commission of 10 percent was paid to the agents. Almost all of the students stayed at the university residences. Everyone was happy.

Some schools viewed the benefits of the longer term exchange programs and said “we should offer homestay - live with a Canadian family for the two or three months and enjoy your trip to Canada even more”. The schools thought their stealing the exchange program housing was so brilliant that they decided to keep all of the commission. Now the agents had to work twice as hard selling the school and homestay and only got commission on half of the revenue.

The agents decided that they should charge fees for this extra work so created service fees that the students had to pay in advance for forms processing, airline ticket reservations and homestay applications.

The schools realized that the agents were making more money from service fees than commissions so they created direct registration internet forms and hired their own staff of foreign speaking sales reps to compete with the foreign located agents.

The foreign agents then decided that since the schools were competing against them as agents then they should set up their own language schools and compete with the schools.

As the marketing wars heated up between agent-schools and school-agents they drove up the cost of trade fairs, coop advertising, brochures, media advertising and sales commissions and they created some “noise”.

There were many observers of this “noise” that decided they should join into this perceived rich marketplace. There are now ex-students and ex-patriots located locally offering tuition discounts, no service fees, free baseball tickets, cheap housing and access to illegal jobs and other incentives to students.

The foreign agent-schools then decided that they had to increase sales and advertising spending and demanded higher commissions. They then reduced the cost of teachers, books and educational materials to better compete with the local schools and local agents.

The local schools went in two directions - some cuts costs and became babysitting schools with no standards no qualifications and no educational value and some attempted to set professional standards and operate with ethics.

The local discount agents unable to distinguish between good or bad schools or good and bad programs or good and bad teachers started to just quote prices with stories that all the schools were the same.

The local schools decided to fight the local discounters with summer specials and “special walk-in pricing” offered if you register directly first time in the school.

The foreign located agencies are fighting the local agents by claiming they will only represent schools if they have exclusive ethnic contracts. The foreign agents are trying to use exclusivity and monopoly contracts to prevent certain ethnic groups from exercising their freedoms and rights while in countries such as Australia, the USA and Canada.

The local agents are now organizing small private schools and language classes disguised as special conversation clubs. To keep costs low they are offering a combination salary and sales commission to the salesman disguised as a teacher.

The latest attempt (Fall 2006) to dominate one of the ESL market niches is by one school who is offering a 40% commission to the local agents to recommend this school. The local agents are busy changing their stories of this blacklisted school in an attempt to cash in on the huge commission.

This war between agents and schools is over money. Just like all the other wars that humans engage in. The Agent & School War victims are the students who think they have purchased professional language lessons but instead attend stripped down, gutted useless babysitting sessions with time fillers.

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Speaking is a vital part of human life. Speaking is the most important skill which differs humans from animal world. Though animals can speak and have their own languages humans are the only animals who can speak common language because humans have abilities to study and be taught. Speaking is not only vital to communicate with other humans in society. Nowadays everybody knows that speaking can influence human lives and even the world history greatly. They say the word can kill or save. People with excellent speaking skills can lead the society and create an environment which develops humans and makes the future for our world. Thus, speaking can be seriously taught from the very young age.

School teachers focus their activity on introducing definite knowledge and skills and very often teachers do not pay so much attention to speaking development. Even if the subject dos not in common require excellent speaking skills (such as maths, geography, chemistry etc.) speaking techniques have to be applied at each lesson. There are a few reasons why speaking should take one of the primary goals while teaching.

One of the primary goals of speaking skills development is to teach children thinking and presenting their thoughts and ideas to others. Thus, children should primary given the examples which will clearly show them the importance of good speaking. Their parents, classmates and friends will be able to understand them and value their ideas and dreams if children can present these ideas and dreams clearly and effectively. Speaking opens possibilities to make new friends and develop study skills. Speaking creates good basis for analytical and research skills. Speaking can greatly reduce various psychological barriers and difficulties while interacting with others or simply passing exams. At last good speaking skills can greatly help in further study and career development.

There are a few effective teaching techniques which can be applied for speaking skills development. They are discussions, developing teacher-student and student-student dialogues and monologues. All these techniques should be applied when a teacher is sure his/her students can think independently and have sufficient vocabulary for definite topic for discussion. To develop students’ thinking and vocabulary it is very effective to develop primarily remembering and reading skills. Ask children to learn definite dialogues and abstracts and then let them declare the learnt information in front of the whole class. Let each student to stay in front of the whole class at least two times a month.

Teachers should encourage children speak at the lessons. The only requirement should be to speak on the topic given or learnt at the lesson. Speaking on given topics can be seen much harder than speaking freely. However, it develops good skills for future study and career success.

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