Snail Gmbh develops games and toys for learning foreign languages.
We worked out a truly innovative approach for getting children to speak and think in English, or indeed virtually any other foreign language!
Our company has a portfolio of more than 30 games for learning languages and enlarging active vocabulary.
The games meet the needs of teachers, parents and children alike. They have been tested and shown to work with even with groups of ‘difficult’ children. The key success factors here are simple rules, easy handling, and accessibility for a broad range of audiences.
As you doubtless know already, certain topics of grammar are always the hardest ones to teach. Consider for instance verbs, starting with the basic ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ – and which of the two to use in a given context. Or the tenses: present, past and perfect each have their own feel and flavour, which children must learn to differentiate and apply in sentence construction. Not to be forgotten are the irregular verbs: dry and boring to be sure, but an unavoidable teaching topic. Or the modifiers can/must/may, and where to apply one of them.
Pressure, rote learning, monotony, boredom - our approach sidesteps the pitfalls by training points of language in a playful context. And because play can be such fun, children will barely notice that they are taking in and practicing a great deal of language at the same time! The result: language learning becomes a thoroughly positive experience that spurs young students to mastering the basics.
What makes our approach so effective? To begin with:
* The games are categorised by age group, from 5 to 14 years, so nobody feels overtaxed; expected levels of intellectual and psychological development receive due consideration as well.
* The games are paced to accelerate the educational process – for positive results, fast.
* The games have been designed and tested explicitly for elementary, pre-school and kindergarten settings.
Trials at educational institutions in Russia and elsewhere proved uniformly encouraging: the youngest pupils learned key basics and soon were talking English at a sufficient level to pass the entry tests set by international schools.
Older children meanwhile became practiced in conducting monologues and dialogues that subliminally reinforced grammar skills, enlarged active vocabulary, and led to fluency in constructing all kinds of sentences – including many exceptions, irregular verbs, and verb tenses they had absorbed without really noticing.
