Intensive language courses or standard classes? What’s the best choice?
*This article is written considering French and English language learners. However, the content applies to all forms of language learning.
Intensive English or French courses
Learning a new language, especially when relocating to a French-speaking country or region like Geneva, Switzerland, is a significant goal for many.
Prospective students frequently ask My Linguistics how many language classes a student should take per week. Should students take several classes a week over several months or intensive classes over a few weeks?
While intensive courses offer advantages, they are efficient if the student is committed in the long term to using the language and is exposed to the it daily after the course.
Determining the best approach—whether intensive or standard courses—requires considering various factors, including your environment, commitment level, objectives, and time constraints.
However, in almost all cases, we recommend not going over the top with highly intensive language courses but instead taking a progressive approach and spreading classes out over months.
Here, you can explore the pros and cons of standard or intensive language courses. We argue that most forms of intensive classes are not as beneficial to the students as courses spread out over time.
Article – Summary
Intensive French or English courses are designed to accelerate your language learning in a condensed timeframe. Typically, these classes involve a higher number of hours per week. Some schools may offer full-day immersion courses, 6 hours a day, for multiple weeks. Schools that sell these courses often publicize the following success characteristics: learners grasp grammar quickly, vocabulary, and communication skills.
Our vision of the question
Overall, we don’t recommend taking intensive French or English courses if these are not followed by total or almost total immersion into the language.
Long-term dedication and practice are the most critical factors in learning a language. If you’re limited by budget but not time, spreading classes over several months will give better results than doing them all in a week or two.
If you, as a student, are lucky to have both the time and the budget to do an intensive language class over two or three months, then this can be a good solution. However, it’s important to remember that learning a language takes time and that cognitively, an intensive class can’t cheat the natural process of language acquisition.
Regular and low-intense courses (5 to 10 hours a week), taken over three or four months, will give much better and sustainable results. Students will retain and acquire the language after the course is taken and can navigate the language with a large degree of autonomy.
Intensive language courses
What do we mean by intensive language classes?
This notion can vary greatly. Some people may understand an intensive course as a class they attend 5 to 10 hours a week (1 to 2 hours a day). Others may understand intensive as over 20 hours of dedicated study a week. In contrast, some consider these 3 hours of study a week.
For this article, we have split up class intensity as follows:
- High Regular: 3-5 hours a week
- Low intensive: 5 -10 hours a week
- Intensive: 10-20 hours a week
- Highly intensive: 20 + hours a week
What language class format works best for you?
You must consider your environment and be realistic about your objective and long-term aims.
Time and personal commitment are the two most essential factors in learning a new language.
Personal commitment cannot eclipse time. Motivation can optimize the time it takes someone to learn a new language, but going from beginner to fluency is a question of many months rather than a few weeks.
Personal commitment
Different levels of commitment and motivation will influence progress. The person who needs to learn the language to earn a living will naturally be highly committed to learning what they need to get by. Suppose a non-French speaker arrives in Geneva and wants to work as a medical practitioner in the hospital. In that case, they’ll be required to pass French language tests before having their studies recognized in Switzerland. The motivation here will be significant. If someone needs to work in a bar, they’ll need the language, but probably to a lesser extent.
Language learning environment
Imagine you arrive in Geneva to start a new job. You’ve relocated from an English-speaking country. The job is in English, and the overall language in the office is English. When you arrive in Geneva, it’s naturally easier to make friends with people who speak the same language as you. Changing this isn’t easy. As you’re uncertain if you will stay in Geneva for many years, you also put your children in an English-speaking school.
A recap. You’re in a French-speaking region, but you work in English, the language at home is English, your friends speak English, and your child’s school is mainly in English.
In this case, your daily exposure to the language is limited.
While your immediate environment is English-speaking, you still need French for daily activities such as shopping, going to restaurants, the doctors, admin, etc.
If you do an intense French course for two weeks, it’s safe to assume that your primary language environment will not change in those two weeks. So, when you reach the end of your course, you’ll not be in a setting where you can practice your French.
For this reason, we recommend that people who are not in a setting where they’re exposed to the language outside of class daily should spread classes out.
What do schools selling intensive language courses say?
At My Linguistics, we reviewed the offers of companies offering intensive language learning services. We looked at schools in Switzerland, France, the UK, and the USA. Many cater to different demographics of students, such as teenage students on holidays, university students, and working adults.
While the type of offer and extra activities vary depending on the demographic, three primary arguments are used in most of these cases to support the highly intensive study.
Three main arguments put forward by language schools:
1. Rapid Progress: Intensive courses provide an immersive learning environment, ensuring students are continuously engaged with the language. An intensive program allows for consistent practice and quick absorption of the material, leading to faster progress.
2. Focused Learning: With concentrated daily classes, students can focus solely on improving their language skills without distraction. The intense nature of the course encourages more profound understanding and retention.
3. Enhanced Language Confidence: Frequent practice and constant exposure to the language in intensive classes boost confidence in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. This immersion experience can make students feel more comfortable communicating in the language within a shorter timeframe.
Buzzwords
While these arguments are founded on grounded linguistic research, they are taken out of context and overall amount to buzzwords. Most schools fail to point out that the advantages of intensive classes will only give good results if the student is committed to long-term practice.
Rapid progress
Yes, intensive classes can permit you to progress in an immersive environment. However, there is a natural curb to progress, so even if you’re in an intensive environment, there is a limit to what you will learn in a short period.
It takes 80 hours to get to proficiency; therefore, I can do it in two weeks!
No! You can’t learn a language in 2 weeks.
Yes, studies and even our professional experience show that you can attain a good level of proficiency within 80 hours of study. However, this won’t be done in two weeks. The 80 hours must be spread out over at least a few months.
But many schools and teachers say that this is possible!
Yes, they do. And you’ll finish two weeks of study thinking you’ve learned a lot. The issue is that your brain needs more time than this to assimilate information properly.
Why do schools say that this is possible, then?
It could be that they don’t share our view on information saturation.
The more optimistic explanation is that they misunderstand data and the logic behind some research and findings in linguistics and second language acquisition.
The more cynical one, and probably closer to reality, is that schools have an economic incentive to sell intensive courses that are less demanding of the student’s time and optimal for the school’s planning.
Focused language learning
Yes, students in intensive courses concentrate on the language, but this is also true of regular and low-intensity classes.
Retention of information is not related to the intensity of a class but rather the type of content and how it’s presented to the student. Information is processed in our brains after a lesson and, most importantly, when we sleep.
Doing 1 hour or less of targeted training a day can be more beneficial, in the long run, than doing 5 hours of intense training. If the training is too long, students risk losing concentration and interest.
Enhanced Language Confidence
Regular exposure to the language will help improve your confidence when conversing with other people in that language. That said, the best way to do this is outside of class.
Classes should help you prepare for the real-world situation where you can put what you learned into practice.
The crucial factor isn’t just the short-term effectiveness of a course but the prolonged language acquisition journey. A student deeply immersed in a language during a two or three-week intensive course may make substantial progress. However, the long-term benefits diminish without continued immersion in a language-rich environment post-course.
Real immersion in a language goes beyond a brief two-week period and requires ongoing exposure and practice. Whether through extended stays in a foreign country, integrating the language into your work environment, or daily interactions, an approach where you create a space in your life for the language is optimal.
The language teacher
We tend to overlook the teacher or trainer factor when discussing ideal class situations and formats in language teaching and coaching. But this crucial factor makes a world of difference to students.
The probability for an intense class is that the teacher or course will devise ways to lower the intensity of the class for the teacher’s sake. Teachers are human beings, and someone who gives multiple intensive courses is likely to lose interest or become weary as the course becomes a repetitive mechanism for them.
To intensive, or not to intensive?
The number of classes you take, standard or intensive, should also be based on how much you’ll realistically use the language daily outside of class. You need to make space in your life for the language and not try to force the language on yourself.
It’s easier to adapt ourselves to the reality of our daily habits than to try and change these.
Irrespective of the quality of a class, taking a full immersion class for 30 to 40 hours a week and then not practicing afterward will lead to poor results.
Addtional reading on the subject:
We include some links to articles and web pages that discuss the subject.
The hypothesis and conclusions of these articles are not necessarily in line with our thoughts on the subject. The most significant difference is that many studies and articles on the subject tend to examine the subject from the short-term perspective of acquisition and tend not to do controlled studies of the long-term efficiency of intensive vs. regular classes. Language acquisition tests are often carried out during or right at the end of a course, rather than leaving a month or so gap to see if students have retained the language.
My Linguistics is dedicated to devising effective language acquisition techniques tailored for both educators and learners. Our language training center, based in Geneva Switzerland, serves as a practical testing ground for our techniques.
Contact us for more insights into our approach and language acquisition methods.
Contact us to learn more about our approach and language method.
