Tony

I help adults and children improve their listening, speaking, pronunciation, reading and writing skills. My teaching style is about supporting students define how they want to learn and how they wish to reach their goals. Ultimately life is the big world outside of the teaching environment. My aim is to prepare students to enter the real world with confidence and teach them the skills to handle unfamiliar situations when speaking English as second language. I believe a responsible English teacher should carry out their role with great enthusiasm, good communication skills, cultural awareness, classroom management skills and students’ personalised support. I also believe it to be extremely important to build equal speaking opportunities to encourage students to speak as much as possible, i.e. 70% of the time students should discuss things in class and or the remaining 30% it should be for the teacher to try to give students the drive and support to speak and succeed. I make sure I adjust my questions, my challenges and my focus. With lower level students, if they are shy or timid I reassure them that being a little shy in the beginning is normal and they can make as many mistakes as needed, because this is part of the leaning process. This is how students will work out what they need to do to correct themselves. Higher level students may not be too keen on reading and we do not want to bore them , but we want to encourage them to discuss, to skim the material, to make a debate, to form a discussion. This is how I will drive students forward and I think this is a good recipe for success. I always make sure I finish my sessions on time and I give students as much time for practice as needed. I provided students with constructive feedback. Students expect professionalism, visualised instructions, to learn something new, to be corrected and to finish each class with a sense of achievement. I believe it is important to use body language to elicit a response from students. They should either answer my questions or parrot or copy what I say. I use props such as visual material to prop and model for the students, to facilitate communication. I taught on line in the past to a variety of Children between the ages of five and twelve. As it was solely based on interacting with children through a screen, I devised a sock puppet called ‘Danny’ to encourage them to learn, as well as a soft teddy called ‘Peter’, which turned out to be an instant success. The children loved the additional entertainment and had a lot of fun whilst learning, which I believe is the most important thing. For me teaching is a two way process where I learn from students as much as they learn from me.