Methodology & student books -
English in groups

We recommend a highly effective method which emphasizes the spoken forms of American English.  It is a modern "English as a foreign language" course, which is the latest (year 2006) development of the well-known company Longman.

The courses Top Notch and Summit were developed by Joan Saslow and Allen Ascher, who are known as the authors of Longman's widely acclaimed Focus on Grammar series.

Over 3 million students worldwide have learned English using the Top Notch program

Please read the interview with Joan Saslow and Allen Ascher, the authors of the books here.

Take an interactive tour of the course here.

Top Notch is a six level communicative English course for adults and young adults, with two beginning entry levels. Top Notch prepares students to interact successfully and confidently with both native and non-native speakers of English. Each lesson provides vocabulary, grammar, and social language contextualized in all four skills, keeping the pace of a class session lively and varied. In Top Notch, students conclude each class session with a controlled or free practice activity that demonstrates their ability to use new vocabulary, grammar, and social language.

A major innovation of the Top Notch series is to systematically build the students' ability to present their own ideas, opinions, and feelings-both accurately and confidently.  For this reason, every activity leads students to gain ownership of the language, progressively moving them away from models to express thoughts in their own words and to improvise based on what they know.

The course immerses you in an English-speaking environment, making the classroom itself a microcosm of the English-speaking world. The goal and promise of Top Notch is to prepare students to move out of the textbook and to understand, speak, read, and write English in the real world.

In addition to the group classes, every student enrolled inthe "Top Notch" or "Summit" course, receives free 24/7 on-line support. On-line tests, and exercises for each Unit of every book of the program, are available for you.  All the supplementary materials can be reached from the student's personal page on ELC's website.

In addition to the course, ELC offers some grammar textbooks (theory & practice) developed by ELC, that enhance the knowledge of certain grammar aspects presented in Top Notch and give students additional grammar practice.

The general course covers six levels (12 seven week terms) form Basic to Advanced level. There are Ukrainian speaking teachers at Basic and Elementary levels, and native speaking teachers at Pre-Intermediate to Advanced levels (where the classes are taught in 2+1 format). Two classes a week are conucted by native speaking teachers, and one class, grammar, is taught by a Ukrainian speaking teacher.

In addition, there are extra classes which give students a chance to have additional practice and will help the students to develop their skills in conversation.

The course with native speakers consists of eight terms (4 levels). All classes in these courses are conducted by native speakers.

After the completion of the Upper-intermediate level, or any level above, you will receive a completion certificate from ELC.

To see the schedule click here.