Language Skills as a Competitive Advantage
Having skills in a foreign language is a competitive advantage and a major success factor in a globally networked, commercial environment - both for companies and for individuals. Where do you find yourself nowadays dealing with a purely national, monolingual environment? Be it your first business contact abroad, or learning the best way to work collaboratively in multilingual teams or learning how to internationalize entire companies and industries or integrating foreign employees, language skills are becoming increasingly important, not only at management level, but also in everyday office life and in educational establishments. It’s always good to have communication skills, especially in English as a world language, but it is even better to have the native language communication skills of your customers and partners.
Companies whose employees do not speak at least the number one business language can face considerable disadvantages against their competition, especially with regard to international business. As some case studies have already confirmed, foreign customers are not even reached and sales potential is lost.
The Right Choice for Language Teaching
So there are many good reasons to invest in teaching your employees to communicate in a foreign language. Especially since this motivates them, provides them with professional development and promotes their sense of loyalty to your company. Yet choosing the right teaching method is often very difficult.
Employees are all very different in terms of their needs, learning styles, individual requirements and prior knowledge. At first glance, the advantages and disadvantages of various teaching methods is not obvious. In addition, business managers and educational establishments have constraints both on their budget and the time available for their staff to learn a foreign language.
Hence, many trainers and professional development specialists are realizing that traditional professional education methods, such as exchange trips or attendance at classroom-based language schools, are quickly reaching their limits, especially when it comes to teaching foreign language skills. Apart from the high costs involved, there is just not enough time for these traditional methods in the hectic, daily routine of the office.
On the other hand, modern education providers, such as LinguaTV, offer employees the option of continuing their studies flexibly, adapting learning times and content individually to their work schedules.
Blended Learning & Teaching
Blended Learning as a learning model aims for an appropriate combination of different methods, contents and formats (e.g. face-to-face teaching and e-learning, formal and informal learning), thereby enhancing their respective advantages and minimizing their disadvantages. LinguaTV has further developed this approach into a unique concept and focuses on an optimal relationship (best-of-both-worlds) for each training project between the social aspects of personal language training (face-to-face) and the self-directed, multimedia self-learning courses that offer effectiveness and flexibility. If implemented correctly, blended learning can improve the learning success by more than 20%.
Virtual Classroom
LinguaTV places particular emphasis on effective and sustainable teaching. This takes place either in a virtual classroom or on site and can be conducted in individual lessons or in small groups. In order to meet LinguaTV's high quality standards, only qualified teachers with experience and additional training are employed. Lessons can be tailored to individual requirements and, if necessary, supplemented with subject-specific working materials. The contingent of lessons can be called up flexibly and can be conducted via browser, app, telephone or on-site. As an integral part of the blended learning concept, live teaching is closely linked to self-directed learning and leads to demonstrably better and faster learning success.
Multimedia self-study courses (with coaching option)
The LinguaTV self-study courses can be used flexibly via app or browser. They rely on a successful combination of multimedia content and interactive exercises. New learning content is taught through entertaining videos and high-quality grammar tutorials. The practical vocabulary and pronunciation trainer enables the students to quickly learn new vocabulary, including industry- and task-specific vocabulary. The interactive exercises consist of a diverse mix of methods, so that all language skills can be trained. A special highlight is the conversation trainer, which enables the learners to take on the role of a protagonist from the scenic videos and thus train their active speaking skills. The integrated speech recognition provides immediate feedback on their pronunciation and intonation, thus improving their ability to communicate.
The coaching offer is an optional supplement to the LinguaTV self-study courses. Students are assigned experienced teachers and educators as personal contacts who accompany them on their way of language acquisition via e-mail, telephone or chat. The respective coach also has access to the individual learning progress of the learners in order to support them optimally in achieving their personal learning goals.
Education as a service
Cloud-based language teaching can be delivered quickly, comprehensively and without sacrificing security and quality, regardless of internal infrastructure. The only requirements are an internet capable device and a stable data connection.
Once these two requirements have been met, entire language courses, including videos, interactive exercises and feedback on learner progress can be accessed by employees wherever and whenever they want - even offline using the app.
With its modular course structure, the LinguaTV language course provider offers completely flexible choices of application, demonstrating how e-learning projects ensure consistent standards of quality, at the same time as taking into account company-specific requirements.
Do not neglect security and privacy
In the pursuit of efficiency and return on investment, IT security and privacy should never be overlooked.
For this reason, all of LinguaTV’s data, including course content and personal data, are separated from one other on dedicated servers in Germany and in this way protected by stringent security measures against undesired access.
Learning Analytics – making the learning process clear, successful and measurable
Analysis tools make the learning process more transparent and help us better understand our strengths and weaknesses. To provide students and teachers and human resources managers with detailed feedback about learner progress, LinguaTV’s analysis tool collects crucial data about learner progress.
To this end, it subdivides language acquisition into various fields of competence, such as vocabulary, spelling, grammar, listening comprehension and pronunciation and measures progress in the respective areas within each exercise. This gives everyone involved a detailed overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each area of competence.
Human resources managers and teachers can use this overview in order to understand better the students’ needs, which in turn reduces student drop-out. When used in the context of Blended Learning - the combination of e-learning with classroom-based teaching - this overview enables teachers to target more accurately the students’ weaknesses and to avoid repeating topics the students have already covered during their private study time.
This motivates students and teachers alike.
Examples of application and references
