Shanghai New Oriental School is the first school founded by New Oriental Education Group outside Beijing, and when it was registered in 2000, most of the other study abroad and training institutions had not yet been established. With its overseas study examination training business, New Oriental has become the first education stock to be listed in the United States, and its position in the language training industry is second to none. No matter from the perspective of word of mouth, teachers, maturity of course polishing or the number of students, its study abroad language training business is still in the first echelon of the industry.
Studying Abroad English preparation consists of two phases: language proficiency improvement, familiarization with the test, and brushing up on questions. The improvement of language ability requires students to accept effective language input, process the input information to generate effective language output, and realize the acquisition and consolidation of skills in the process. The core content of the traditional language training course is the explanation of question types, the teaching of skills, the teaching of machine skills and the prediction of exams, and the mode of full classroom teaching has little value for the improvement of language skills.
In 2015, New Oriental IELTS program took the lead in reforming the industry, introducing the Complete IELTS textbook from Cambridge University Press, and re-structuring the IELTS Express course around the textbook, building a new teacher training system, they must be proficient in pedagogical practice, understand the basic knowledge of second language acquisition and educational psychology, and have extensive knowledge in the fields of linguistics, language assessment and foreign language learning. The teacher quality model of this type of course is clearly different from that of famous teachers in the traditional training industry.
If the candidate's language proficiency and the language proficiency corresponding to the target score are not much different, then the first stage can be omitted and go directly to the pre-test sprint, and the short-term courses in the traditional training industry will appear in a flipped classroom mode. In 2016, Xuncheng, an online education company under New Oriental, signed a strategic agreement with ETS (Educational Testing Service Center) to become the exclusive distributor of ETS TOEFL online TPO in China, providing students with tools to prepare for the TOEFL test. New Oriental and ETS not only adapted the TOEFL past questions, but also developed graded textbooks for Chinese students based on the TOEFL corpus, and introduced the ETS scoring tool SpeechRater to test students' English proficiency when they entered the class.
New Oriental also cooperated with iFLYTEK to launch the artificial intelligence product RealSkill at the end of 2017, mainly for machine essay correction and oral evaluation, and in actual use, this system is also deeply integrated with the original teaching process. In 2018, New Oriental, together with Cambridge University Press and Cambridge University Examinations, launched a new IELTS learning product "MINDSET FOR IELTS", which is based on Cambridge Learner Corpus and is specially developed for Chinese students, including learning materials, grammar and vocabulary, online listening, speaking, reading and writing training, as well as training content for Chinese students' language weaknesses and academic English. In order to meet the ability level of candidates at all stages, the product includes four levels, and the learning form covers online and offline, and students can complete online modules on New Oriental's own learning platform. This kind of curriculum design is no longer based on teachers' experience, but relies on the analysis report provided by diagnostic assessment, intelligently matching with learning cases in the database to determine the learning path, and data capture and analysis are carried out throughout the learning process, so as to adjust the teaching objectives and strategies at any time to achieve optimal learning.
New Oriental has nearly 60 teaching sites in Shanghai, covering various regions. In the highly competitive and homogeneous language training industry, many training institutions are dilapidated and depressed, and there are few students, but New Oriental has spacious classrooms, many students and a good learning atmosphere. TOEFL has a preparatory class, a basic class, an intensive class, a crash course and a score through train class, and in addition to the 5.5 series, 6.5 series, and 7 series according to the target score, IELTS also has a preparatory class and a single improvement class. The 25-person medium-sized class is the class with the strongest teachers and the highest gold content, and the price of each class is about 180 yuan - 300 yuan. The price of a small group of 8 students is much higher, the price of each class is about 430-660 yuan, covering courses such as IELTS, TOEFL, SAT, SAT2, ACT, AP, SSAT, TPEFL JUNIOR AND INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH EXPERIMENTS. Generally speaking, the examination and training institutions will use better teachers in the basic stage, so that more students can continue to apply.
Of course, the shortcomings of New Oriental cannot be ignored. In recent years, the overly large New Oriental has also focused its business on K12, and some problems have emerged in other businesses, such as false packaging of teachers; Most of the 1-to-1 small classes are practiced by graduates, and the teaching level does not match the course price at all; The teachers in the large class are good but the students' attention is too low, and the students need to do a lot of questions in their spare time to keep up with the lecture content. Teachers have low hourly wages, many class schedules, and several campuses at the same time, so they also have a high turnover rate.
