Like a gardener needs to know a lot about botany, a language teacher needs to know how languages are learned. And if science is not enough – a botanist is not necessarily a good gardener – it cannot be dismissed or ignored. But implementing the findings of the most recent research in Applied Linguistics into effective teaching practices requires a deep but nuanced understanding of the cognitive and social factors involved in language acquisition; nuanced because we are far from understanding how the human brain works.

However, Research in Applied Linguistics – a field now more often called Second Language Acquisition – is unanimous: in order to properly learn a language, one needs to speak it. This is why so many language schools advertise their communicative approach. But how to teach speaking is far from being that obvious or simple : the more students in the classroom, the less feasible it is and it also requires specific techniques that are not often introduced in teacher training. This is even more crucial as there is no point in limiting a classroom at, say, 7 students, to have them doing fill-in-the-blanks exercises.

Since the 2010s, we have developed a craftsmanship in this fundamental aspect of language development: growing our students’ abilities to speak French with ease and confidence. We have been honing our craft combining insights from the most recent research and our experience in teaching hundreds of students from everywhere in the world and very different walks of life.

Because it is based on a constant attention to the cognitive and social factors that shape language acquisition, we called our approach Socio-cognitive Teaching. It aims to develop genuine social interactions to ensure a strong cognitive involvement and focuses on the learners needs, skills and learning profiles. It doesn’t rely on books, except for beginners, and is built around sequences of practical task-based and life-based exercises. It also combines an open grammatical curriculum founded on a careful but flexible progression and a narrative approach to lexical development. When it comes to grammar, our priority is to develop a nearly perfect command of the fundamentals more than a sound knowledge of the technicalities. Last but not least, we have developed feedback techniques – we call “pruning” – that encourage an optimal growth ensuring you’ll be “corrected” just enough (and not too much or not enough). We also document your evolution to be able to provide adequate counselling and change tools and gears according to your strengths and weaknesses.

In a nutshell: not too much and only natural fertilizer, adequate pruning and constant attention to your needs. This is our craft.