The magazine which you are holding in your hands is the result of a very successful experiment. As a language school, we work hard to identify and apply the right teaching method which would help our students to really learn a foreign language. And because we all know that there is no miracle technique how to learn a foreign language fast, we tried to apply the most basic and at the same time the most effective teaching method – project learning. In our case, the technique involves all participants of the teaching process: students, teachers and the school.
It should be said that all the components mentioned above are equally important in language education and the result will never be optimal without their active interaction and mutual cooperation. Sure, a student has to be active and be involved in study with a certain level of enthusiasm and determination. For that, however, he/she needs a teacher who would encourage the student’s activity with appropriate motivation. In order for a teacher to be able to do that, he/she needs support from a school and room for creative work and enjoyment of work. That is why we came with the idea to give our teachers and post-secondary school students an opportunity to try to create together something which would not only prove their language skills, but also would become an effective language tool for other students and teachers, as well as be amusing reading for the general public. And because our school will celebrate a 10-year anniversary next year, we feel we have become something of specialists in our field. Even though we anticipated a certain level of passivity from our students and teachers, we were pleasantly surprised by their attitude. All the students got down to work writing the articles in a foreign language with unusual zeal and joy. The articles handed over to us by teachers were of splendid quality. All that was packaged in a sophisticated design and the result... see for yourselves! We will be pleased if you send us your opinion – we are planning to issue another (an improved?) issue next year. I would like to disprove the notion that young students are often passive or lazy and teachers too little creative. I think (or rather, I am sure) that the mistake lies in attitude. In whose attitude? That is the topic for our next editorial. I wish you good fun with our new magazine and hope that it will bring you some kind of inspiration in the area of attitude to language study.
