The Dialogue Approach
To communicate rapidly and effectively in a foreign language

The Natural Learning Environment

1. A Vital and Non-Artificial Process

• A Totally Language-Speaking Environment
  A natural language learning process can only take place in a milieu in which everyone speaks to the student in the target language. Students spend the entire day, from breakfast through to the evening, with their teachers.
• A Non-Academic Environment
  Students must truly feel they are not “back in school.” The rooms, rather than being classrooms, become meeting rooms, communication rooms, living rooms. Students don’t suffer through a rigid evaluation test, rather the teachers, more as guides, take personal interest in the students and in so doing use their skills to assess the students’ level, their needs, their optimal path to language mastery. During instruction, the student is not “interrogated” by the instructor, but rather taken through a series of natural review dialogues with the teacher. These dialogues let students find their place in the process. Rather than submit to evaluation, they go through an evolution. At the completion of the training, students themselves assess their progress in terms of a grid of 8 indicators: written comprehension, oral comprehension, pronunciation, ease of oral expression, grammar, general vocabulary, professional vocabulary, and achievement of goals.
  The use of the terms “guides” and “trainer” instead of teacher are not gratuitous. At Dialogue, we don’t conduct lessons or provide courses, we activate communication sessions. We do not give students school exercises, run language laboratories, or promulgate a reference manual, rather we bring in a slice of real life, all in the target language.
• Real Life Language
  Each Dialogue session focuses on real life materials (television shows, articles, songs, professional documents, or sometimes the text used by the teacher in an academic class) in a manner allowing the learner himself to express what he wants to say. Furthermore, every explanation (tricky grammatical items, explanation of vocabulary) put forth by the instructor is inspired by the learner’s real life needs and the context of the lesson at hand.