As you may have guessed, I love languages. We were lucky enough to spend a few days in Italy over Easter. The excitement I felt when I finally got to use my Italian again was huge, and that is exactly the feeling I hope the school children in my High Flyers English groups will have when they get to try out their English on holiday, maybe even in an English-speaking country.
At this level it’s not about every utterance being perfect – and almost 25 years after I spent two years learning Italian at school, my attempts at conversation are certainly far from native level (!) – but it is about enjoying doing your best. It’s about the pride you feel when you succeed in communicating successfully. It’s about wanting to have a go, about managing to understand a sign or a snippet of conversation, and it’s about the thrill of 
being understood and managing to order an ice cream, ask for directions, or even have a little chat with a friendly local or make a new friend at the playground (or bar, for us adults!) Because success breeds success, it becomes addictive.
Of course there comes a point when perfection is part of the goal, when you have mastered enough of a language to be able to use various tenses properly, slip in some sophisticated vocabulary, conjugate verbs in your sleep and build complex sentences using subordinate clauses. The better you get the better you want and need to be. This is the stage my secondary school Eager Eagles tutoring students are getting to or are already at.
But initially it’s primarily about making yourself understood, it’s about each and every successful interaction boosting your confidence and spurring you on to keep trying, keep talking, keep doing your best. This then naturally develops into a desire to speak “properly” and build sentences correctly. And practice certainly makes perfect in this respect.
In the hour a week we have together, I hope I manage to inspire a love of English and a desire to speak & understand in the children who attend my classes.
I’ll be collecting plenty of new material when I visit my family in Birmingham at the end of the month to make the upcoming classes as interesting and relevant as possible. Because a language that is real and tangible is one that you want to get better at, one that you want to grab any opportunity to use.
I love languages, and if I manage to ignite this passion in as many High Flyers as possible, then tutto è bene!
For more information, please see https://nestsandwings.de/learn-english/#highflyer