My name is Jason West and I founded Languages Out There. Getting to this point, being able to give unlimited online access to our English lesson plans, ideas and materials for teachers and learners around the world to use at a very affordable price has been a dream of mine for many years.

Languages Out There was established by experienced language teachers in July 2001.

Thousands of people, from 14 to 70 years of age, have subsequently improved their language skills with Languages Out There. 94% of them say they would recommend us on their feedback forms.

Our objective is to change the way that language is taught by introducing expertly structured methods that incorporate interactive, real world elements into every class.

Do please indulge me a little and allow me to explain a bit more about Out There, it will only take a couple of minutes and I hope that once you have read this you will understand why we have persevered in order to finally make these English lesson plans available to you.

I have been involved in owning and running English language schools in London, UK, for over sixteen years. Languages Out There, has been operating for over seven years. Since July 2001 it has developed a way of teaching and learning English that is very natural, brain-friendly,challenging and fun. We have taught our lessons to thousands of paying students from all over the world and every single one has completed a leaving questionnaire.

Before you hopefully use this website to find out what we do, why we do it and how we do it I just want to tell you how much time and effort has gone into the creation of these unique teaching and learning materials.

Our lesson plans are based upon a design and format that we experimented with in the summer of 2001. My colleagues and I tried numerous lesson plans on real students in central London and after about four months of testing and discussion we settled on a format and timings for our lessons that gave us the optimal input time that allowed our students to work with and absorb new language to the point where they were then confident and able to use it in the real world with people they had not met before, i.e. the Out There section of the lesson plan.

The idea of the programme was to create a series of lesson plans around the twenty most important areas of language that come up in conventional course books and to be able to speak and understand that language at each level. As we created the lesson plans we taught them and then adjusted them to improve their effectiveness. We continued doing that for six full years of teaching to students from around the world who came to London to improve their English skills. So, every one of our English lesson plans has been taught hundreds of times. It has been amended on the basis of the feedback from many different teachers who have taught it and it has improved every single time.

In 2006 we asked Tim Bowen, a very well-known teacher trainer and English language teaching author to help us edit our lesson plans for publication. At that time the lesson plans contained exercises and content that we had created ourselves.  We re-wrote some of the exercises, adapted some content and created new graphics and a new 'look and feel'. In 2007, with Tim's help, we employed some very experienced English language teaching materials writers to again re-write some of the lesson plans and incorporated some content from the Guardian who worked with us at that time. Then Tim, my colleague Jon Jones and myself edited them intensively. It nearly drove us mad as there was a lot to do!

Finally, we completed all two hundred and forty lesson plans, both those for English teachers and those for students to study themselves (and which can easily be used for one-to-one teaching). There are over two thousand five hundred pages of lesson plans and attached student worksheets in total.

One of the things that makes our teaching and learning lesson plans unique is the time it has taken to publish them and the amount of real teaching and testing of the materials that has been involved in their creation.  I can honestly say that all of these lesson plans work extremely well and that students appreciate their ability to help them improve their English communication skills and confidence quickly and enjoyably. Also that teachers really enjoy teaching with them as they actually let teachers teach by removing worries about lesson planning, finding supplementary materials and getting timings right in class.

Why we have created these lesson plans:

I ran a British council accredited english school in central London for eight years and got tired of students arriving and telling us that they had used the coursebook we had just given them (actually, I was embarrassed!).

I thought that there had to be a better way to study English in London.  A way that was much more interactive, realistic and challenging; that took students out into the real world and made everything they did with the language much more real.  I also thought they needed a better deal if they wanted a short course of one to four weeks and wanted to improve quickly, see London, meet the locals and have an amazing linguistic experience. I created English Out There to do just that.

The idea was to make learning English much more real and contextually relevant; to get students out of the classroom and out into the English speaking world every day to practise language with local people in interesting places and hope that it helped them to improve quicker.

It did.

We knew we needed to think very carefully and differently about how we taught because we were asking the teacher and the students to leave the safety of the classroom and go out into the real world. We worked out how to make every single lesson as effective as the others by using a clear structure and template for each and every session.  This helped us to manage the learner journey and maintain the quality of each and every single student's personal learning experience. Instead of creating materials for a finite space (i.e. a classroom) we looked in towards the learner's individual learning experience and sought to manage their experiences and emotions because we realised that we could not control the real world (i.e. infinite space).

Once we got our system established and as we grew in confidence ourselves we started to notice students improving very quickly. We had focused on communication and speaking and listening skills and our level placement test was (and still is) an interview with no test of reading or writing. Because of this if a student couldn't speak they went into the beginner or elementary class. When they were there they often found the language taught in the classroom to be easy but then they had to go out and use it with people they had never met before. Because the language was easy they could concentrate on controlling their anxiety and preparing to speak to people in public. To help them we paired them with more naturally confident students and the teacher also stayed close-by to provide emotional and physical support.

I remember one Japanese student from the early days; I think her name was Emi. When she arrived to start her four week course she wouldn't speak and was very shy.  So we put her in elementary.  After four weeks of fifteen hours per week and just before she went home I bumped into her outside my office and remembered her from her first day at school. "How are you Emi?" I asked. "Great!" she said, "I can speak now", and then she started speaking at great speed to me, with huge confidence, in English.

I spoke about Emi to Georgina Moon, our Director of Studies and the person who had helped me to create the Out There lesson plan format. Georgina told me that no one could shut her up now and that she had gone from elementary to intermediate (up two levels) in just four weeks. We were a bit baffled, but excited. 

This was happening with other students too so I thought I should investigate properly. I started reading some serious academic books about linguistics and language learning.  I had studied some psychology at university years ago and had always found human memory fascinating and had enjoyed the lectures I attended given by a Professor Mike Gruneberg.

I found a book called 'A cognitive approach to language learning' by Professor Peter Skehan. His book was a revelation to me.  It was highly academic and all about psycholinguistics, in other words, the application of psychology to the learning of languages. At the end of his book he described some ideas on how to apply what he had written about. They were very close to what we had created, almost by accident.  I even wrote to Peter Skehan to tell him what we were doing and he replied and said he could see why it was working as I had described, but that no one had ever tried something like it on the kind of scale we were doing it or even outside of a laboratory.  I still have his email.

So, I began to read more and more linguistics and psycholinguistics books and read Krashen, Pinker and others and have come to a number of conclusions about what we do, they are:

• It makes enormous scientific sense but no one else is doing it
• It works because it is much more brain-friendly than the conventional way of teaching and learning languages
• It is very challenging for the learner but if you give it a go you will get big rewards in terms of fluency and confidence and it will help you to make your 'passive' language knowledge 'active' (this last description of what our lessons do was dreamt up by Serbian students training to be English teachers at Belgrade University who still come and do our course in London).

What we have created is definitely not for everyone who wishes to improve their language skills because it involves a little bravery for the first one or two lessons and the re-designing of your own internal learning strategy.  But, once you have had a go and felt the buzz of successfully speaking to a stranger using language you have just been taught or learnt you will understand that the language can easily and naturally become linked to the unique places, topics, emotions, smells, sights and sounds that occur during every Out There session. Happenings and experiences are memorable to the human brain, our lesson plans manage them in a way that means every single learner has their own unique and special learning experience every single time and it is that that enables them to remember language they have learned and use it again in the future.

Language teachers, especially TEFL teachers, often get a raw deal. They love their work and they love their students. They really love seeing and hearing their students learn and improve and give their work huge committment.

I hope that what we at Languages Out There have created, our ready-to-teach and stand alone active lesson plans and the use of them with cutting edge online services such as meetup.com and amazing online virtual classrooms like wiziq.com will enable TEFL teachers everywhere, the world over, to supplement their income.

Finally, I would like to express my huge gratitude to Georgina Moon, Jon Jones, Tony Evans, Maria Stamati and Tim Bowen for believing in my vision. Now let's see what happens.

Cheers

Jason