Job Discussion Forums

[matador]

(On average) how long does it take to complete one level of English and be good enough to go up to the next? If a student studies at say 40 hours at intermediate level, would they then go up to upper-intermediate?

Similarly if a learner studied 40 hours at pre-int would he then be able to go up to int??

My boss asked me and I honestly did not know so I fudged it a bit. Thanks for the advice!

Elementary
Pre-int
Int 1
Int 2
Upper int

are our levels at my school in Torayama in Tokyo. I am just looking for a general guideline in terms of hours, not a thesis on the ins and outs of levels....

[oich]

Completely depends on the student. One student might study for years and never get above intermediate.

[Glenski]

So true, oich.

At my old language school, I had many students who constantly took the same classes over and over, but never improved one bit. One guy in particular could barely string together enough words to make an intelligible spoken sentence. He said he was going to study in Australia for 6 months, and we all expected him to come back much more fluent. Of course, he didn't. He only studied written English there. Talk about a waste of time. He came back no better than when he'd left.

For what it's worth, that old language school offered 40 80-minute classes at each level.

[TokyoLiz]

Levels, shmevels.

My students in a full-time day school went from Hi, my name is to using the simple past tense, numbers, dates, clock time, colours, survival English functions, and perhaps 1000 vocabulary words in about 180 hours.

One guy never got quite past the Hi, my name is stage after two tries.

If you're only seeing the students in 50 min classes once or twice a week, I'd expect a little longer.

As they progress in levels, it gets easier and harder for them to learn new stuff. Students plateau at lower intermediate. What'S lower intermediate? Well, they've seen all the grammar and functions, but can't use them correctly yet without some prompting, and they have a heck of a time with everyday conversation, some have pronunciation problems that interfere with meaning, enough reading ability to study independently and a start at idioms in English.