Oliver Lucia

I have personal experience of being taught French from primary school up until university, my current level of study. I would say this lets me know what is and isn't useful in language teaching. For me, language and culture are inseparable, so my lessons will try to integrate as much real-world French culture as possible (art, film, music, literature etc.). I like to get to know my students, so that I can recommend them content that links to their interests. Exercises will come from a range of sources, to get students used to interacting with genuine French content, for example, newspaper extracts or clips from television. I will cover the language in terms of the four disciplines generally established by exam boards: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Equal attention will be accorded to each.

The starting point of my tutoring is situating your level of French and identifying your strengths and weaknesses. If it is hard for you to understand certain concepts, we will try to approach them from different angles as well as looking at them in the context of genuine usage (sometimes textbook definitions can be quite restricted). I will try to speak as much French as possible during classes, so that the language becomes less abstract - it is not something you are revising to pass an exam, but something you are learning to use in your life. Of course, this is not always possible (with beginners, for example), so I will also use English when necessary.

We will go through key grammatical concepts step by step and this will form the backbone of the language tutoring.

For lessons we can use MS Teams or Zoom (it is really down to preference).