LANGUAGE Travel Ireland (LTI), a company based at the National Technology Park in Castletroy, offers overseas visitors more than just the opportunity to improve their English.
It operates a unique network of homestay and farmstay full immersion English programmes, where visitors study with their own private English teacher and receive one-to-one English lessons.
Noel Kelly, the UL graduate who set up the company in 2009, explained the many factors that enable LTI to stand out from its competitors. One such aspect is the provision of a company website in a variety of languages, a seemingly obvious option that many businesses actually overlook.
Mr Kelly pointed out: “If you’re expecting somebody in France to find your tourism thing in Limerick by searching in English, it’s not going to happen. People in France, amazingly enough, speak French.
“When they go on Google they use French. Put it up there for them in French and we find that on Google it’s amazing how we can be so high up in the results compared to our competitors just because we have it in French.”
LTI offers students an intensive programme of approximately two weeks where the one-to-one tuition allows learners to grasp the language at their own pace. Mr Kelly believes that this tailored learning is significantly more helpful than generic group teaching.
“That’s the criticism a lot of people make of group lessons. You go in there and you’re fed a menu of what you’re going to go through, no matter what your level. It would be one of our philosophies that the lessons can be customised around your needs, so we’ll try and incorporate your interests into the lessons.
“The lessons can adapt as you go along so it’s totally customised and individualised. There’s a major focus on building vocabulary and speaking within the lessons, whereas in a big group you really can’t do that. It would be the same as if the student was back in secondary school in France. In a group session in Ireland the teacher stands up and most of the time the teacher is talking, whereas with us, we concentrate on getting the student to talk.”
Another aspect which is unique to LTI is that the courses are available to families in rural areas as well as cities. The farmstay programme gives visitors the chance to learn English while experiencing farm life, something that they may never have seen before.
Mr Kelly said: “The idea around that is you live on an Irish farm and you get involved in the day-to-day life on a farm. You don’t do any real work but you might be collecting eggs, feeding the hens or helping with making the hay. For students coming from Paris or other cities who have never been on farms before, it’s a great experience.”
LTI is made up of six office administration staff and four local organisers, as well as more than 230 host teachers who accommodate the learners for the duration of their stay, which is usually for roughly two weeks. While Mr Kelly endeavours to bring as much business as possible to Limerick and the Shannon region, business needs and travel arrangements have required the company to branch out to Dublin, Cork and Galway, while the farmstay courses extend to a number of different counties around Ireland.
LTI hopes to add to its existing French and Italian websites with a German equivalent by the end of 2013, with Mr Kelly aiming to capitalise on Europe’s most popular tongue, one that is spoken by more than 100 million people in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
For more information on the LTI programmes, visit www.englishireland.ie
