Teaching method at Liden & Denz

Communicative approach

All our courses are based on communicative approaches and combine learning common expressions used in everyday situations with thorough and systematic grammatical approach. This is of vital importance for learning a language like Russian, which has an inflectional system and a non-fixed word order – a language in which word endings or word’s place create the meaning.   Conversational topics are given with appropriate grammar structures, while the grammar part of the course proceeds gradually from simple “basic concepts” to more complex issues in a psychologically proven order (e.g. naming objects – describing locations – actions with objects – moving to and from, etc.).

One of our most important principles consists in giving our students the linguistic means to express themselves in everyday situations by constant training of communicative skills and models, which allows learners to reach their own communicative objectives.

Outdoor teaching

Applying our communicative approach means that we want our students to be able to use their language skills outside the classroom from the very beginning. That is why we regularly take them to the streets, markets, railway stations, and make our students practice what they have just learned. In taking students out of the protected and sterile environment of the classroom, we expose them to different speech patterns, dialects and age groups in various places with substantial levels of noise, likely to distract them. By overcoming these distractions and getting their message across, our students gain confidence of speaking in non-familiar situations. Outdoor teaching also helps our students to discover the city under a different angle.

Our teachers

All our teachers are native speakers and hold a university degree either in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language (RKI) or Linguistics. We encourage our teachers to learn new languages, because we believe that having this experience as students is a valuable source for further improvement of their professional skills. Our teachers apply a variety of techniques ranging from introduction to the Russian language history, from etymology and comparative linguistics to role-play, live discussions and creative work (drawing, story telling) in the class. Teacher training sessions take place on a regular basis. In a team work they share their experience, discuss the problems they recently solved, new methods and techniques they implemented and evaluate new teaching materials.