Callan Method

As a teacher of the Callan Method for many years at ELTA School, Dublin, Ireland, and many other schools around the world, I have found and still find it an amazing method for enabling shy, less confident learners to produce English sounds clearly while remembering important grammatical structures without thinking, and so produce full clear sentences at a rapid learning pace.

Because every Callan Method teacher must correct every mistake every time a student speaks in a lesson over and over again, the student has no real option but to eventually speak with clarity.

As regards the learners I have taught, I have heard them state many times ‘we learn the grammar, but we never speak.’ The Callan Method absolutely solves this problem with its unique format of mainly focusing on spoken English rather than the written word.

In the first lesson the student is taught vocabulary and instinctive grammar constructions, which are learnt by listening and producing the sounds and then constructing them very quickly into a full sentence. This is repeated many times and corrected many times to reinforce and push the new vocabulary and grammar into the back of the student’s mind so as to store and reproduce later on.

These new words and grammar, i.e. chunks of words, are used to learn new vocabulary and build the new sentences. Because of the nature and unique style of the Callan Method everything is done at speed, quicker than natural conversation. This means the ear is trained, right from the first lesson, to understand fast spoken English the kind of English you would hear at a business meeting, in a film, travelling or working in native English speaking countries. This is important as most language learning does not focus on the speed of spoken English and how pronunciation changes when spoken quicker as much as the Callan Method does.

The goal of learning any language is to communicate what you are thinking to another person. You can know all the grammar of a language to the highest form of proficiency, but if you cannot produce clear speech, you have little chance of communicating effectively. The Callan Method is the most efficient means of achieving your goal of successful communication in spoken English.

Harish Verma, Callan Method Course Director