Learning Greek in Greece – Teaching method

Learning Greek in Greece, island Ikaria

Learning Greek in Greece, at Ikarian Centre means:

  • The teacher speaks as little as possible in the class, and encourages students to speak instead.
  • The number of students per class is very small; from 1 up to 4 students maximum. During 2 hours (120′) of instruction per day, students have the opportunity to talk a lot in the class. In addition, we try to make each class consist of students who have more or less the same needs and learn in the same way.
  • The teacher briefly presents the lesson material (vocabulary and grammatical rules), encourages the students to speak using THIS material, and corrects students’ mistakes.
  • Every day students have homework to do after the class time (listening and writing exercises, working in projects and preparing brief lectures in Greek) and must spend at least 2 hours in order to work with it.
  • Usually the contact with the language does not stop after class hours. The teachers and the students live together on campus – or very nearby – and create a community. Many of the after-the-class-activities are organized in order to encourage contact between the members of this small community.
  • The environment is friendly and relaxed.  There is no reason for stress or formality, as we believe that learning should be a game that gives pleasure a pleasure.

What makes our Greek language courses really intensive?

In each lesson we try to “push our students to their limits”. In this way our courses become as intensive, challenging and interesting as possible. The result is that all students improve their skills as much as they can. Usually after a course of 10 days (20 hours x 60 min / hour) they have spectacular improvement.  Even our beginners reach a fairly advanced level after only two weeks. For example, the videos below are “shows” written and performed by a beginner groups. The plays were written and performed by the students themselves. None of them had knowledge of Greek before attending a two-week Greek language course in Ikaria. After two weeks they could use a basic vocabulary (about 300 words, including 50 verbs in the present, future and past). The result: