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ABCzaam is an organization which guarantees a young person to live one hundred percent in complete and compulsory immersion for one or two weeks.
At ABCzaam, throughout the duration of the internship, the young person has the assurance that they will only practice the target language of the internship: Dutch, English. This certainly seems very demanding. However, all our young people tell us that what at first seems very difficult, becomes, after just two days, a fun challenge.
The means we put in place to achieve our objectives are as follows:
1. Quality and quantity supervision: on average, 1 adult for 3 young people. If we want young people to speak the target language all the time, it is imperative to ensure that the supervision is functional. Who makes up this framework? An Administrative Director, a Financial Director, a teaching assistant, a first instructor, a nurse, a barmaid and two language facilitators (a teacher and an instructor) for eight students, not counting the kitchen and maintenance team, this amounts to an average of twenty adults for fifty young people.
2. Being competent and in numbers is important; but being among the young is essential. In our jargon, this is called « dispersal » and it reminds everyone involved in the internship that two trainees should never be left alone.
3. Being competent, in numbers and among young people, is almost perfect; All that remains is to offer fun activities, to encourage young people to communicate and to kindly correct them in situations.
4. A high-performance team, effective objectives, a constructive atmosphere, as you will have understood, it is crucial! That said, we also need the good and positive will of our trainees. Thus, books, mp3s, cell phones, t-shirts and dictionaries or anything reminiscent of the mother tongue should be avoided during training. The young person must completely immerse themselves and play the game in their new language. It is obvious that, despite all our good will, an internship cannot succeed without the clear and positive will of the young person and the parents who have confidence in him.
5. Indeed, also essential, is the firm support of parents. This is why, if possible, we ask parents, during the course, to communicate with their child(ren) in the target language. Don’t worry, if necessary, at your request, a member of our team on site will be happy to correct or translate your emails as long as their length and frequency are reasonable, of course.
The results: A student, with no prior experience in the target language, having completed a 2-week internship at ABCzaam...
– will be (re)motivated by language learning;
– will be able to use the 500 most common words in the language;
– will have heard and worked with around ten different accents;
– will have received the equivalent of 150 hours of lessons over the year and this intensively;
– if he fails, will have an 80% chance of easily succeeding in writing at school and 100% chance in speaking;
– will know around ten songs by heart;
– will know the name of around ten colors, professional places (bakery, etc.), professions, sports, clothing, means of transport, or names of vegetables, animals and musical instruments and, above all, used these words regularly in lessons and in games, …;
– will no longer translate and will have acquired reflexes in the target language.
In addition, he will master skills such as: asking questions, knowing how to tell time, counting, using the different tenses of main verbs, etc. But above all, he will have a solid linguistic base: He is already, after just one internship, someone who will no longer be afraid of expressing himself in the target language. This is why, if your child obtains a good participation report in the internship, if he also follows courses in the target language of the internship during the school year, and participates in three or four of our summer internships , we are ready to guarantee you that he will be bilingual: that he will have fun daring to practice the target language because he will do it spontaneously and without effort.