Our English Center is the cornerstone of our public outreach. We offer a high-quality, proven successful approach to English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction.

We are pleased to learn that our reputation in the community is growing! While there are many fly-by-night “schools” that pop up ever year, trying to teach English, and there are some schools who have stood the test of time by being “big”, none of these sources have the unique collection of factors and resources that we have in our English Center.

Our curriculum is based on solid and time-proven standards for English language instruction. Another resource we have that is essential is native English-speaking teachers! Because other training programs do not have English speakers teaching, they naturally shy away from phonetics, pronunciation and conversation practice.

And without USE of a foreign language, that language becomes like Latin to you… it may be read and mostly understood, but is DEAD as far as communication is concerned.

We use the same core “essential vocabulary words” that are used in teaching the primary western languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, etc…). In English, these essential concepts work out to be about 850 vocabulary words.

In our course, we augment this list and have edited the list so that the words are current for our world today. This list was distilled over 50 years ago, so some editing was required! However, the basic sociological aspects upon which the list is based is still accurate.

This list of 850 English words distills down to about 600 unique Spanish words. The overall Spanish vocabulary is far smaller than that of English — there are many interesting reasons for this disparity, but we don’t have time or space to cover that topic here — and we cover the list from both directions, English and Spanish.

Basic Level of English

In the Basic level, we cover the 16 most essential verbs in English, which equates to about 20 – 25 verbs in Spanish. As is to be expected in any cross-cultural comparison, English and Spanish group their sociological functions in different groups, hence the difference in verbs needed embrace the same concepts across language barriers.

We cover the major English verb tenses in the Basic level of instruction:

• Simple Present
• Simple Past
• Simple Future
• Present Progressive
• Conditionals
• Compound tenses (auxiliary verb “to have”)

Ironically, our students often end up learning more about their Spanish grammar as they learn grammar in English! But then, that same phenomenon often happens for English speakers, too, when they learn a foreign language.

The Basic level integrates the vocabulary list with the essential verb tenses and requires that the student create sentences of their own. By the end of the Basic level, the students are able to put together short paragraphs.

Basic level graduates know and/or are able to:

• greet and exchange pleasantries in English
• converse on a basic and simple level (short sentences with a single subject, generally no longer than 10 – 15 words per sentence)
• answer simple questions (single subject sentences)
• ask questions of their own
• ask for clarification of the English speaker’s vocabulary or pronunciation
• give a description of the word they need and can ask what is the English word
• ask and tell the time
• Months/seasons of the year, Days of the week, periods of the day/night
• American holidays and special days
• greet various classes of people (man, woman, child, friend/family, stranger, boss, etc…)
• give and take simple directions using prepositions and cardinal directions
• count, virtually to inifinity (knowing the English number pattern) in both ordinal and cardinal numbers
• and many other “incidentals” along the way… such as homonyms, synonyms, common confusions about words/phrases and other points that generally only a native English speaker will know.

Intermediate Level of English

With the Intermediate Level, we build upon what was taught on the Basic Level and advance a bit further. Our current Intermediate text will take the Student to a solid Upper Intermediate Level.

The highlights of the Intermediate level are:

• 1200+ Vocabulary Words
• 25+ Verbs
• more complex sentences (subordinate clauses, compound subjects, compound predicates, etc…)
• more practice in reading, comprehension, composition and rephrasing
• more conversation (the Intermediate class is conducted TOTALLY in English!)
• intro to “critical reading” skills

SELF(c) — Speak English – Learn Fast

This course is a “listen-repeat-learn to speak” approach to language learning. This method has been proven effective in many case studies and in many language courses. The Berlitz courses are perhaps the most famous to use this method. I learned Spanish using the Pimsleur course.

The SELF(c) course will be the first phase of our TEAM-TELL [Teaching English As Ministry - to English Language Learners] program for churches in the States and missionaries around the world.

For the SELF(c) course, we use the book of John and portions of Romans. Not only is the Gospel most plainly explained in John, giving us a simple vocabulary upon which to build, the book of John is one of the most powerful witnessing tools in the Bible. The portions of Romans that we will use, as a more advanced vocabulary, are very clear in pointing out the sin in our lives that must be forgiven.

As a prototype program, we will only offer the SELF(c) class to enrolled students. We will have better feedback from our existing students and with their help we will be able to tweak the program and have it ready for an initial deployment in our pilot churches (beta testers!) very soon.

With the feedback we get from our pilot churches, by 2011 we will be able to offer a fairly sound version to other churches and missionaries around the world.

Taller Leer [Reading Workshop]

As with our SELF(c) class, our Taller Leer is only open to enrolled students. In this way we can quantify and verify their levels of comprehension and thus be able to choose essays and books that are at an appropriate level of difficulty.

The readings that we choose, in addition to being on an accurate level, will also include sound moral lessons, include critical and deductive reasoning (skills which are not taught in Bolivian pedagogy) and will often have an evangelistic message.

As the students work on comprehension of the readings, they will have to write explanations of those readings. We will work on skills of apologetics and debate, which prepare minds for discernment and the ability to sort out truth from fiction and obfuscation on various levels of public and private sentiment.