METHODOLOGY & COURSE MATERIAL

For over 33 years Margarida’s School has been teaching Portuguese as a foreign language, assisting foreign nationals that are working and living in Portugal.

Margarida’s School unique teaching method includes the proprietary course book “Pois... Pois... Portuguese is Fun” divided into 6 volumes.

These provide students with a structured learning programme and includes scenarios from everyday Portuguese life, in addition to essential grammar and vocabulary.

It is a text book, a grammar book and an exercise-book all together. 

Its illustrations are humorous and the texts are useful and fun.

The way it has been set up constitutes an easy approach to learning Portuguese, it’s light and easy and it contains only what is important.

It revises and consolidates.

It constitutes a live tool which has proved to be both effective and enjoyable, having been updated several times.

4 audio CDs complement the original course book and are of great help to support self-learning and listening at home.


Written practice:

In our experience, many adult learners find that it is easier to learn a language when you know how to write it .

Therefore we encourage students to write at home what we have covered orally in the class so that they consolidate the information and learn how to spell, build sentences and become familiar with

the differences between written and spoken portuguese.

The left page of Margarida’s course book is blank and can be used as a note pad.

It contains a lot of exercises to fill in and blank pages to write sentences, short stories or dialogues.


Grammar Practice

We consider Grammar a very important part of the course as latin languages differ substantially both in word order and gender.

Grammar is helpful to learn the Portuguese language correctly. 

But we also think that grammar can be learned in a fun way and does not need to be necessarily scary. 

Portuguese has a lot of different tenses, prepositions and pronouns and quite a lot exceptions to rules, but we have to see it as a challenge and not as a handicap.

The book contains all explanations of the important grammar points with exercises to fill in and it is very well structured. 

It teaches new structures, revises and consolidates.

To make repetition more enjoyable, lively and dynamic we use a lot of teaching materials such as.

* cards with verbs, pronouns, prepositions, adjectives, etc 

* a huge variety of board games created by Margarida Alberty.

* flash cards and other grammar games.

Each book covers one level. 

Participants who have completed each book successfully assess automatically to the next level. 

For the Portuguese Language Courses the following number of hours are required:

A1- Beginner                               A1/A2 - 96 hours

A2- Pre-Intermediate

B1- Intermediate                          B1/B2 - 96 hours

B2- Upper- Intermediate         

C1- Advanced                             C1 - 60 hours

C2- Superior                               C2 - 72 hours

The amount of hours required to complete each level also depends on each student or group, language ability, motivation and practice outside the classroom. 

Observation:

Mid-term relocation of students can be arranged. 

If during the course group participants are not able to follow the learning rhythm and encounter some difficulties or are progressing more rapidly than expected, it’s necessary that they move to the appropriate group. The more homogeneous a group the better for all involved in the learning process. 

A CERTIFICATE is given to each participant at the end of each level upon request.