Language Trainers news and events.

Language Trainers Teach Spanish at The Language Show

From November 15-17, 2019, Language Trainers was in London, UK attending the 31st annual Language Show. As the largest language exhibition in Europe, it is the perfect place for the world’s language experts to offer teaching and professional guidance to students, schools, universities, recruiters and culture experts. So, it was with delight that Language Trainers accepted an invitation for the second year in a row to share our expert teaching methodologies via a series of language taster sessions.

Under the leadership of Academic Adviser Mariana Serb, who also attended last year’s event, the Language Trainers team also comprised Marie-Therese Bougard and Carmen Blanco-Olaizola. Over the course of the weekend event, the three each taught a taster session of their own native language: Romanian, French and Spanish, respectively.

The Language Show event is an excellent opportunity for the language providers, such as the companies and organisations who participate, to let the public know all their available opportunities when they want to learn a new language in the UK and abroad. You can also purchase books in different languages and find information about learning in other countries. I recommend teachers to attend as well, as I do every year. (Carmen Blanco-Olaizola)

Unsurprisingly, Carmen’s Spanish course proved to be one of the more popular of the 23 free taster sessions hosted over the three days. Interested attendees were free to sit in on the 30-minute session at their leisure, meaning Carmen had no way of knowing the Spanish language level or experience of the people she was teaching. Thus, she decided to teach an elementary class, wherein the short syllabus covered common and survival phrases and numbers.

But Carmen did not just teach her students basic vocabulary and pronunciation! As a representative of Language Trainers, she demonstrated our talent for immersive, organic language learning. She encouraged audience interaction by asking attendees to share their Spanish language knowledge, speak out loud and pronounce words correctly, and complete short paper-based exercises. Furthermore, she encouraged learners to pair up and practise asking and answering questions:

“The people who attended were engaged in the lesson and motivated. They interacted with one another via the planned activities, including asking for each other’s name, nationality and telephone number. I could see that they all had fun just by looking at their faces.”

In doing so, Carmen helped appeal to a whole range of learning preference styles, giving the attendees the best chance of learning something new and leaving the event feeling positive about learning Spanish in the future.

Carmen, Marie-Therese and Mariana displayed their preparedness, professionalism and expertise and did a fantastic job representing Language Trainers at The Language Show! The team effectively demonstrated Language Trainers’ core values and teaching practices via fun and engaging taster sessions, promoting our brand image in the process. But most importantly, each team member delivered an inspiring taster class, encouraging new language learners to pursue their personal language goals in 2020!

Language Trainers Canada is now in French

We are proud to announce that we have recently launched our website in French for all our French-Canadian and French-speaking audience.

Language Trainers is a global organization with a mission to make language learning as convenient an experience as possible! We teach any language, anywhere, anytime, which includes finding you a local native-speaking tutor in your town or city to teach you lessons at your home, workplace or a mutually agreed public place.

But our intention to encourage more language learners around the world permeates everything we do, including the content of our website. We provide detailed information on the main language courses we teach, our talented trainers and our most frequently asked questions to provide you with as much information about our services as possible. We even offer free language resources to help you get started at home!

But while our website contains a treasure trove of information and tools to get you started learning your next language, we were primarily catering to English speakers by writing the web pages in English. This is something we always intended to rectify for the benefit of more than 7 million French Canadians in Canada; not to mention the millions of French speakers around the world.

Our promise to make language learning convenient extends to providing our website in the native language of our customers, which is why we are delighted to launch the French version of our website!

We hope you will be excited to learn that everything on our English pages has been translated and is now available on the new French version of Language Trainers Canada. We have even assigned our French-speaking staff to handle our clients’ inquiries and look forward to receiving any and all questions about our courses and how we can help you master your next language.

If your native or preferred language is French, then please click here for the French version of Language Trainers Canada.

Language Trainers Brings Romanian to The Language Show

London- From November 9th to 11th Language Trainers had the opportunity to be a part of The Language Show London 2018. This conference brought together some of the best ideas, best practices, and best technologies in language learning today. Language Trainers was honored to share its methods and excited to learn from all the other participants.

Language Trainers sent Academic Advisor and expert teacher Mariana Serb to share its teaching methods and practices with the conference. She took her 30-minute time slot and taught the attendees the ins and outs of basic Romanian. Her challenge was to teach the conference goers how to greet each other in Romanian by the end of a mere half an hour.

“Thirty minutes was short, it was a bit difficult, but it was fun to share some Romanian with the conference” Mariana Serb, Language Trainers Academic Advisor

By the end of that short block, Mariana had successfully taught her students basic greetings and pleasantries, and bid a fond ‘Mulţumesc’ to all her students.

Mariana demonstrated in just thirty minutes in London what Language Trainers teachers do all over the world, every day. She used the latest in education research, combined with innovative teaching methods to expand the knowledge of her students in a fun and interactive way.  These methods helped the students learn the basics of Romanian, just as they help students learn languages from Arabic to Zulu.

“ It was exciting to meet so many language providers and passionate language learners at this unique event, and I must say that what I enjoyed the most were the language tasters that I attended.” -Mariana Serb, Language Trainers Academic Advisor.

Language Trainers is proud to be a part of the language teaching community. This community helps bring our world ever closer, speed the integration of markets, and foster understanding among cultures. Conferences such as the Language Show bring together the best minds in the community, and Language Trainers is proud to share our methods.

ISO 9001:2015 Certificate Renewed

Language Trainers has achieved the renewal of our company-wide ISO 9001:2015 quality-management certification, formerly known as ISO 9001:2008, for the provision of language training services to organisations and individuals.

ISO 9001:2015 certification is a globally recognised standard awarded to organisations to help them meet the expectations and needs of their customers. The primary goal of this standard is to improve customer satisfaction for a company by defining the processes needed to meet their customer's requirements. New to the standard are specifications regarding risk and opportunity management that strengthens its use as a governance tool. This makes implementing multiple management systems much quicker and easier, ultimately saving both time and money.

We pride ourselves on the excellent quality and service that we provide and by updating this certification, Language Trainers will continue to strengthen its position within the language education industry.

Language Trainers Accredited by the BBB

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a non-profit organization established to advance marketplace trust between businesses and consumers throughout the United States and Canada. Businesses accredited by the BBB adhere to eight Standards for Trust that include the following: build trust, advertise honestly, tell the truth, be transparent, honor promises, be responsive, safeguard privacy, and embody integrity. 

We at Language Trainers recognize the prestigious accreditation that goes along with the BBB's evaluation standards. We are delighted to announce that our efforts comply with their qualifications and deem us a reputable business with honorable business practices. Although in the past we have always strived to provide our trainers and students with the highest quality service, this acknowledgement highlights that effort and acts as a guide that will help to uphold our place as an outstanding company.

Client Control Center

Every year, we teach over fifty languages to thousands of language learners in over three hundred cities throughout ten countries. As we continue to grow, we are always working on ways to improve our services with management tools so that every client can get the most out of their lessons. After listening to what our corporate clients really wanted and diligently working for over two years with our IT team, we are proud to present our newest feature, the Language Trainers Client Control Center for HR Departments. We understand how important it is to stay on top of your training administration and here, your HR/Learning and Development departments will be able to do just that. You are now able to monitor each individual employee's progress with instant, real-time reports as they go through their language courses. To learn more information and start getting instant reports for your employees, make sure to go to the Client Control Center and learn how you can take and track your company's language learning to the next level.

Lower Prices for Online Skype Classes

After a reorganization of the way we run our online Skype classes we now offer the options of shorter courses (our minimum course is now only 10 hours) with greatly reduced prices. Our native speaker qualified teachers teach one hour sessions (longer sessions are available on demand) as often as you need at a time that suits your busy schedule. These are ideal for people who need a flexible option who may also need to take classes on the run. With modern 3G internet speeds, many of our clients take their classes on their smartphones when they are not sitting at their desks. Prices start at $US25 per hour for one-to-one and $US17.50 per hour for two-to-one (all prices can be converted into local currency at the prevailing exchange rate) and the Skype connection is completely free.
More information on our Online Language Classes can be found here.

New Community Manager

We would like to extend a warm welcome to Paul Mains, our new Community Manager. Paul will work as a “bridge” between our Academic Team, our clients and our trainers and focus on reviewing and improving the academic materials (course books etc) that we use, the ongoing and end-of-course feedback that we currently have, and the additional content that we offer to our teachers, clients and the wider public such as free level tests and reviews. Paul is a TEFL-certified English teacher from New York State, has a degree in Linguistics and Psychology, has research experience at Harvard and Stanford, and has participated in multiple Linguistics and Psychology conferences.  Contact Paul on [email protected]

Listening Tests

Following on from our vocabulary and grammar level tests which have been in use for 10 years, we are proud to announce the launch of our new listening tests in 15 different languages. The tests are aimed at Elementary level or Intermediate level and combine great content with a very user-friendly interface which makes taking the test a very enjoyable experience. To see which tests are available, please go to our Listening Tests.