The Project's Philosophy & Aim

For Spanish business people and professionals, the English language is often an essential tool for communication. Most Spanish adults lack sufficient proficiency with the language and, as a result, suffer an important loss of professional effectiveness when traveling abroad on business or when receiving important visitors from around the world. They feel frustrated at not being able to convey the richness of their professional skills through a language they cannot use effectively. Your job will be to help them toward greater confidence in their ability to communicate, by exposing them to a wealth of rich speech and accents and by having them express themselves non-stop for 80 hours straight (5 days x 16 hours/day). You will not need to know or teach English grammar; this is not our objective. You will only need to talk with different people just like you'd talk to a good friend or a fun and interesting neighbor.

We want to expose our Spanish friends to real English. to the real McCoy. not to a watered down, standard version of the language. Most English teachers do the latter and, in the end, they do their students a disservice. We will not do this to them. We will expose them to the language just as they may hear it on the streets of London, Glasgow, Dublin, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Cape Town, or for that matter, Coffeyville, Kansas.

The key words are "quantitative" and "qualitative". VaughanTown will be a "quantitative" approach. The experience will be quantitative in the sense that we will throw the English language straight into their face. we will shove it down their throat. They may gag a little, but they will have no choice but to perk up, wise up, and learn to meet the flow head on and digest it.

Conventional language training is like learning to swim in the shallow end of the pool. The instructor holds you underneath so that you are level with the pool surface and you perform the new strokes being taught. If you flounder you don't get any water up your nose. At VaughanTown, we want them coughing up half the pool. Why? Because that's what often happens to them in real-life language situations.

In an English class, if a student makes a mistake, the teacher corrects him and that's that. It's like a flight simulator. If you crash, you don't die. However, when the Chairman of the Spanish Fertilizer Association attends the bi-annual meeting in Zurich of the Pan-European Association, where he and 12 other European Chairmen must hammer out a series of grievances to hand up to the pertinent E.U. Commission in Brussels, if he doesn't follow the cross-currents of the discussion, he's dead.

He goes through an excruciating two-day experience of feeling like a complete idiot. And to top it off, he must lunch and dine with these 12 men over the two-day period, where they talk about all kinds of subjects, from their daughters' ballet lessons to the likelihood that Fidel Castro will die in the coming year. Cases like this are true, blue cockpit experiences, where if you crash, you're splattered over a 300 meter radius. Of course, we cannot totally emulate in VaughanTown such anxiety-ridden experiences, but we can come much closer to them than can be achieved in conventional English classes. Therefore, when we sell the program to Spaniards, we state that they will not be with professional trainers, but insist that this is exactly what they most need. And it's true.

VaughanTown is a non-paid, volunteer program where Native English speaking participants exchange conversation for room and board in the heart of the Spanish countryside.

You will come to Spain under the umbrella of Vaughan Systems, the largest in-company language training firm in Spain. Our 300 trainers provide more than 350,000 hours per year of language training to over 5,000 executives and technical personnel in more than 520 companies, with such names as Microsoft, Ericsson, Accenture, John Deere, Ford, Pfizer Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Coca Cola, Heineken, Exxon-Mobil, and a very long etcetera. In our classes, we build for our Spanish executives the foundation, main pillars, and beams. At VaughanTown, we will want *YOU* to expose them to "the real McCoy" and, in essence, finish off that roof for them.

Are you VaughanTown material? If your answer is YES to the following questions, we welcome you to experience the five most memorable days of your life!

Are you a Native English speaker?
Are you naturally inquisitive?
Do you enjoy nature and the outdoors?
Are you patient and helpful?
Can you talk about many different subjects?
Do you enjoy learning new things?
Do you enjoy socializing and meeting new people?
Are you outgoing, open and friendly?
Are you interested in learning about the Spanish culture and people?
Do you enjoy helping people learn something new?
Are you brimming with enthusiasm and zest?
Are you adaptable to new and different food?
Are you creative and fun?
Are you totally clueless about the Spanish language?
Have you had no previous english teaching experience?

Vaughan Systems has offices in Madrid, Santander, Vigo, Valladolid and Zaragoza. We are currently hiring English teachers for our offices. Visit www.vaughanteachers.com