IUP / BLI and spoken Chinese

[Andrew987]

I’m a US university student currently studying in China. This year, I’m attending CET Harbin program. I’d like to stay in China a second year to study, and I’m curious about the BLI program. At CET Harbin, I study newspaper reading, spoken Chinese and business Chinese. My reading level has improved quite well this past semester, but my speaking is not improving as much. Each class makes us give an oral report each week. In addition to this, we take a pronunciation class and I go to meet with a teacher after class to ask questions and more or less practice speaking.

So at this point I feel I am confident in newspaper grammar, but still have to look up lots of words. Ultimately, I want to use Chinese for work and daily communication. I feel giving all these oral reports is very stressful, takes lots of time to prepare and doesn’t really help improve my natural speaking ability.

For next year, I applied to IUP and some other programs, but I think most of these study abroad programs rely on the "give tons of oral reports" method.

Can anyone tell me some pros/cons of the BLI program? Would it be appropriate for some with my background and interests? I heard at BLI you can take all your classes one-on-one. This seems like it would be beneficial to improving spoken chinese.

Anyone have any feedback on BLI or a better method of improving spoken chinese, please speak up.

Thanks