Nacel has more than 65 years of history : what can explain this sucess?

Nacel has been founded in 1957 in France. More than 65 years after, Nacel continues to offer rewarding language travels abroad to students from all over the world. How to explain this sucess? Gérard Avundo, former Program Director at Nacel explains us the sucess of this language travel organization.

Original and innovative study abroad programs: unexpected sucesses!

"I can give some examples. Being in Miami to visit a center. In short a few decades ago I am in Miami in a hotel and I request some services in English and I have a hard time getting them. Until I realized that when I said the same thing in Spanish right away I got satisfaction! So I realized what others maybe knew but I didn't at the time is that the Miami area was actually bilingual. I said to myself : "but wait, there is something to do there!". So with the partner school I put a bilingual program in place and it worked very well. Students experienced the atmosphere of Miami which is very American and attended English lessons in the morning. In the afternoon they attended Spanish. It was possible to combine those two languages at the same time! 

After that I created all kinds of stays, thinking it will never work, but we had very good surprises like for example English and fishing in Ireland that worked for years! Or English and martial arts: it was a little weird but I liked it! 

These innovative and always renewed and inoovative study abroad programs contributed to the wealth of Nacel compared to other competitors. nacel offered a large choice of programs. Last but not least we created the stay combining Australia and Japan. 

I indeed realized that there was students who were interested in Japanese. Japanese is a  difficult language so before launching into Japanese study it is good to have maybe some notions. I realized that returning from Australia our French students were flying through Japan. So we combined four weeks in Australia and one week in Japan. Our students lived with a Japanese  family. These families spoke English but initiated out students not only with  their language but above all to their culture. Students were returning to France then and some have decided to continue their study of Japanese,  others stopped. It was a very useful and rich study abroad experience."

Where does the name NACEL comes from?

"The name NACEL is actually an acronym. The founders used the basket of an air ballon for the logo, it was actually a drawing by Jules Verne. I don't know exactly why, I know that one reason is that it was a royalty free drawing! In French NACEL is the acronym for Nouvelle Association Culturelle et Linguistique. But everyone has always been saying NACEL. 

Our American friends who were working with NACEL at that time also searched for a possible acronym. In the USA, NACEL was an acronym for North Atlantic Cultural Exchange League. NACEL in the USA kept the French pronunciation by the way! So here is the origin of this company name!" 

Why is NACEL so strong in both the USA and France? Where does this strong relationship comes from?

"In 1967 everything has changed. Students were usually going to the UK since 1957. 
Two teachers said to each others: "England is good but America would be better!". And that resonated in the heads of young people. It was the era of the American dream so when we were telling young people that we were going take them to America, applications were made in half an hour! So quickly NACEL launched a first stay in the United States. It was innovative, no one had really done it before! 

At that time in order to organize such a stay NACEL had to find places in a Boeing 7707 with 100 students. It wasn't so easy. An American teacher, Mr. Murphy was our first local coordinator in United States. He was sharing the values of all people who collaborated with NACEL to make this project comes trues, i.e. raise of education for young people. We did not how how the people would react, but it is end US families reacted very very well and they opened their doors to young French people. We had 100 students coming for 4 weeks the first time! Imagine that there is no cell phone so we only heard about them when they returned!

Imagine these young people who returned in high school and whe teacher was asking : "What did you do during your summer vacation?" "I was in the USA". That was something! "