A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF OUR ACTIVITIES

Atalanta Educational Ltd. was established in 1988, and since then has earned itself a sound reputation as one of the best private language teaching institutions that provides quality services for its customers. Our school is committed to student-centred teaching and continuous quality control.

We have been providing language courses for companies since 1990, and currently we are running 160 courses at 120 companies. About 70% of our clients are joint venture companies. In recent years our school has considerably expanded its range of activities and currently is running not only various kinds of language courses but also vocational training courses and distance learning courses in an increasing number of fields, from marketing to computer sciences.

Our language teachers are highly qualified professionals who have the necessary teaching credentials and experiences as well. Specially trained mentor teachers regularly visit their classes to maintain the quality of the teaching and give feedback and advice to the staff. We provide regular workshops to up-date and improve staff expertise. Our colleagues are also encouraged to participate in conferences, workshops and other professional events to keep pace with the developments of the language teaching profession.

At the beginning of each course a needs analysis is carried out so that our teachers can best comply with the requests of the groups and satisfy their needs and wants. Furthermore, to provide better customer service, teachers regularly ask for students´ feedback. At the end of each course an achievement test is administered and the student as well as the company is informed of the results, which are complemented with a short written feedback.

Students are encouraged to do self-study to further improve their knowledge of the language. To help them to achieve this goal, we set up a Self-Access Centre, where a wide range of materials are available for self-study. To help our students with their independent language work, one of our mentor teachers holds free consultation hours on a weekly basis. In the last three academic years we also ran a language club for professionals, where a highly qualified native speaker teacher of our staff served as master of ceremony and facilitated target language conversation.

Our language school has been an accredited member of the Professional Association of Language Schools since professional accreditation was introduced in 1993, and has successfully met the rigorous quality requirements of the Association 4 consecutive times. We are also a member of the Association of Adult Education Enterprises, and started preparing for an ISO 9000 audit, which is due in autumn, 2001.