Today is the third instalment of the story of Luciana from Brazil. She had decided against studying in the United States for a number of reasons. This is when she came across Cape Town in South Africa as a possible option for learning English abroad.

Luciana did not know much about Cape Town so decided, in true Luciana fashion, to do lots of research. She Googled Cape Town and saw that the city was beautiful and quite similar to Rio. There were beaches and mountains and the city looked clean and cosmopolitan. She read reviews on TripAdvisor of Brazilians who had visited the city and the vast majority were positive and encouraging. There were a few mentions of safety issues but she knew, as a Brazilian native,  that one had to be sensible when living in a big city. Then she started investigating the school that the agent had recommended. The school’s name was Oxford English Academy and it was also an international franchise.

She started, as she always did, by finding the school on language travel forums. There were a number of entries and once again, 90% were positive. She knew that it was impossible for one school to satisfy everybody, so was not discouraged by the few random negative comments. Then she had a look at the school’s website and it was informative and easy to navigate. Lastly she looked at the school’s Facebook, Instagram and YouTube social media accounts. There were many photos of happy students in class and on the schools’ social programme. In addition she appreciated the fact that some posts were in Portuguese and that some students had given video testimonials in Portuguese as well. The school was highly rated and always responded positively to all comments and queries on their social media platforms.

Luciana was very interested in what she saw so decided to contact the school directly with specific questions. After all, she had to consider the quality of the tuition, the ease of living in the city and of course the price.