walkwithdeath

Review of Alliance Française de Paris Il...

AVOID THIS PLACE LIKE THE PLAGUE!

AVOID THIS PLACE LIKE THE PLAGUE!

I moved to Paris to achieve my lifelong dream of learning French. I decided to enroll in an Intensive Course at the AF (5x a week, 4 hours a day), seeing as how I naively thought that I would learn a lot during a short period of time.

The AF is the main "go to" school for learning French as a 2nd language abroad. But in Paris, it leaves much to be desired.

At first, the lessons were fantastic; small, friendly group with a smart, caring teacher. All seemed to be going well until we started receiving new students each week, changing the flow of the lessons: the classes grew bigger and the quality dropped.

When we moved to a new level (A2) we were surprised to learn that our group had been merged with another Intensive group. All of a sudden, we went from having 10 students to 17. How can a group with 17 students be considered Intensive?! As a consequence, everybody suffered, since our oral production dropped (i.e we spoke less) and we began to feel as though we were being held back.

To add insult to injury, our teacher was sick for two weeks. The AF did a wonderful job of finding 3 substitute teachers for this period. The problem with this is that these teachers didnt really care whether we learned or not - they were only there to teach the lesson and never discussed any long term plans as to what they hoped the class would be able to achieve in the end of this period. In other words, there was no continuity regarding the material of the lessons - the lessons fragmented, as though the learning process had stopped.

I have to be fair, I did learn SOME French. But not as much as I would have liked. The AF has to go on a long spiritual journey to see how they can improve their method and their image with their students, many of whom openly criticise the institution online.