Joseph

Bonjour and buenos días : ) I'm Joe and I am a French-English bilingual who is also fluent in Spanish; I was born and grew up in England but lived in France and Spain for most of my adult life, and studied French, Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Liverpool before that. This gives my French and Spanish an academic foundation to back up the oral fluency; meaning I am at ease teaching grammar, history and culture as well as purely spoken French/Spanish. This will make me, I feel, a particularly valuable teacher to my future tutees, as I am confident that such recent and extensive lived experience of the French and Spanish languages and cultures will set me apart from many tutors. I am very keen to share my knowledge and experience with you, and will be able to offer up-to-date and culturally relevant materials with first-hand insight; I will also take great pleasure in teaching students a more natural idiomatic French/Spanish than what is often learnt in a textbook.

Tutoring Experience

I have just moved to London to take a break from a 13-year teaching career in France. I gained lots of teaching experience there teaching English, and completed a CELTA Cambridge teaching qualification along the way.

Most of my 13 years teaching in France were at the University of Rouen. My activities over such a long period were many, but suffice to say I gained a wide array of experience and taught a great variety of subjects, levels, ages and backgrounds. I have extensive experience teaching grammar, culture and conversation classes, all skills which are transferrable from English-teaching to French- and Spanish-teaching; I am fluent in grammar terminology, the phonetic alphabet, and other linguistic knowledge, and more importantly have lots of experience in how to make these often arcane areas approachable and understandable to my students.

I have experience with a wide range of ages: university classes involved students from the ages of 17 all the way up to mid-20s and even above (in the case of mature students); on top of that I also worked at several secondary schools, which gave me extensive experience with teenage students and their common behaviour/attention issues. I am very familiar with the attention spans of modern teenagers, and know to limit my talk-time and regularly check comprehension and any instructions given. I have learnt over the years to calmly keep my classes a controlled but relaxed space where students are comfortable participating and expressing themselves, making for an engaging learning experience for everyone, me included.

High-school teaching also taught me to adapt my language, teaching, rhythm and difficulty levels to a less proficient audience, so I am comfortable tutoring all kinds of skill level, from beginner to expert.

My 2019 CELTA qualification gave me a more rigorous and methodical style of teaching. I learnt a lot about carrying myself as a teacher, paying greater attention to my language and coherency, monitoring students, checking comprehension, structuring classes and timekeeping. All of these new/improved skills greatly enhanced my teaching once I went back to a classroom; my classes are now more organised, smoother and more enjoyable for both my students and myself.

Tutoring Approach

It is always my highest priority to foster a comfortable and convivial rapport with students while still maintaining focus and ensuring they are learning and speaking English. If students have school/uni/exam work that they need help with I'm more than happy to oblige; or if a relaxed conversational approach is preferred, where we look at 'complicated' things like grammar problems as and when they appear, then this is absolutely fine too. Get in touch and we can organise our first class!