H Balholm

Review of Alliance Française de Blumenau

Overall, I had a positive experience with AF Montp...

Overall, I had a positive experience with AF Montpellier. I would recommend AF Montpellier to anyone considering enrolling in their language program. I did a 4-week intensive course as a non-beginner.

Tips: If you are looking to make a noticeable improvement in your French whether you are a beginner or have some prior knowledge, seriously consider spending at least 4 weeks. I struggled in the first 2 weeks and only started to pick up steam and notice improvement and confident in my abilities starting in the 3rd week. Take advantage of the conversation workshops and excursions offered these are great ways to practice and meet other students. Strongly consider doing a homestay to further immerse yourself in the language and accelerate your progress. There are other language schools in Montpellier--if you are contemplating spending a sizable amount of time in an immersion program, consider spending one week at each of the other local language schools to see which school/program fits you best.

Highlights: Montpellier is an excellent medium-sized French city that is not too big or touristy (such as Nice) where one can feel truly immersed in authentic French language and culture. AF is centrally located and in a quaint building. The AF administrative staff are helpful and welcoming. As I was doing my research on schools, I had reached out to other AF locations around South of France and AF Montpellier was the most responsive and helpful. Kudos to Christopher B. for helping arrange a homestay to accommodate my dietary restrictions. Thank you to Ivana for helping reunite me with my lost luggage and to Biljana and Flavio for helping coordinate the excursions (the school arranges affordable daily and weekend excursions which are great ways to see the local areas and make friendships with other students in AF and other schools). The lessons are structured well with a topic of the week. Each day, an element of reading, listening, oral, and written comprehension is covered. It is clear the instructors enjoy what they do and are willing to go out of their way to help.

Areas for improvement: While I appreciated the level of structure and organization in each lesson, it would be nice to have had more interactive and engaging lessons rather than basing the lessons solely on the textbook exercises. At times, the lessons could feel too canned and standardized according to the textbook. I would recommend AF consider designing more interactive lessons with friendly competitions among students for grammar/vocabulary exercises and more oral non-scripted oral presentations that made you think on your feet I think these are excellent methods of instruction and could keep students more engaged and excited about coming to class. It would also have been nice to have more frequent conversation workshops each week.