The Cactus Course Outlines provide a learning framework for the Cactus Foreign Language Evening Courses. They are designed to provide you with a good idea of what you might cover over a 10-week period, and include typical themes, grammar and vocabulary fields. They are flexible rather than prescriptive, in that our teachers may decide to adapt their learning plans to the specific level, aims and interests of their classes. If you want to cover the same course outline in a shorter period of time, we also offer One-Week Online Courses and 5-week Courses in selected languages.
See also our Can Do Statements to find out what you should be able to do at the end of each level.
Arabic course outline
Chinese Cantonese course outline
Chinese Mandarin course outline
Croatian (Bosnian/Serbian) course outline
Czech course outline
Danish course outline
Dutch course outline
French course outline
German course outline
Greek Course Outline
Hebrew course outline
Hindi course outline
Italian course outline
Japanese course outline
Korean course outline
Norwegian course outline
Polish course outline
Portuguese course outline
Russian course outline
Spanish course outline
Swedish course outline
Thai course outline
Turkish course outline
All our group courses are academically sound and promote long term aims with the language. The teaching is communicative, challenging, interactive, fun, and engages and stretches our students.
Our teachers are qualified and experienced language trainers, and are all native or bilingual speakers. They have been interviewed by our full time Academic Team, and have had their references followed up. We assign classes according to the strengths of our teachers and work with them to ensure the quality of course delivery is excellent at all times. We have also introduced a comprehensive Teacher Development Programme at Cactus, which incorporates a range of seminars, classroom observations, same-language teacher forums, regular newsletters, and information on methodology and hands-on teaching techniques. Our teaching philosophy is based on looking at ideas, asking questions, and meeting challenge.
Our courses are monitored throughout. Reviews are gathered from you by online questionnaires and acted upon by Cactus wherever appropriate. Teachers are consulted and provide direct input into course syllabuses and materials. By learning with Cactus, you enter an ongoing dialogue between you, your teacher, and us. We aim to provide a clear learning pathway and ensure you make real progress in the language of your choice.
We require a minimum number of students to be able run a group course. This number varies from centre to centre and is advertised on our website. Whilst the vast majority of courses easily meet this requirement, some variations sometimes don’t. We will always try our hardest to run all of our courses as advertised, but cannot guarantee that courses which don’t meet the minimum student number will be able to run. For more information, please refer to our FAQs.