This is Peggy, Our second Student of the Week
We
were pleased to see Peggy again and flattered that she had chosen to come
back to La Ferme for her refresher course. Yes, Peggy had already taken a
course with us four years before, when she was living in France. During her
three years in France, she tried to use and to improve her French as much
as possible, and reached a good intermediate level.
After four years back in the United States, she was still quite fluent in normal conversation, but she was losing her French vocabulary, and making more and more grammatical errors. She finally resolved that she wouldn't let her French just slip away through neglect, and decided to come back to La Ferme for a very intensive week: 25 hours of coursework plus conversational practice.
Peggy is also interested in the learning experience from a professional point of view, because she is a teacher herself. She taught at the elementary level for many years, and now works at the university level, helping other teachers learn to teach better. What better way is there to understand the learning process than to regularly recycle your own learning skills? That is certainly another reason why Peggy came back to La Ferme, and also helps explain why she took an intensive Spanish course last year in Spain.
So, did Peggy achieve the goals she had set for her course at La Ferme? We think she did. By hearing and speaking French all day she more than revived her dormant vocabulary. Mireille, our head teacher, mixed brief grammar lessons with the conversation, and reinforced the grammar points with written homework. Then by pointing out poorly constructed phrases, Mireille encouraged Peggy to correct her own mistakes, which se was able to do more and more often by the end of the course.
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