Dear Network
Merry Christmas and a prosperous, healthy and happy 2025 to all of you and yours.
I have a favour to ask for my Christmas/50th Birthday present and it won’t cost you a penny/centime, just a click and a moment of your time…
Here’s my pitch… you can read it all or just skip to the end My goal (your gift).
My experience as an English teacher.
Since I left the UK and the corporate world I have been living in France and teaching English online mostly (except for an occasional onsite course at the local Uni).
At first, I was teaching kids in China which was a great internship but over the years I have moved into ESL for business (English as a Second Language).
In France there is something called Compte Personnel de Formation (CPF) which is a pot of money that earners accumulate throughout the year from their – equivalent of UK National Insurance – social/pension contributions. It is used to pay for training in professional development. Learning English comes under that header and a good chunk of my students now are CPF students.
My classes.
CPF training has led me to build my own curriculum based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and create my own lesson plans based on news articles. I don’t plagiarise – I keep a note of the author and the link in each lesson plan but I use the text in a variety of ways:
I can ask the student to pick out any new or unfamiliar vocabulary which we decipher and put it into sentences of our own. I can read a section and then ask the student to summarise it as a listening/speaking exercise. I can use it to pick out a grammar point and expand on it. If there are any images within the article, these can be used as an exercise – describe the picture to me as if I can’t see it. And I can ask the student to give their thoughts and opinions on the topic of the article.
All of this generates production of English language and practise makes perfect.
Correction is fundamental – most ESL students will not be corrected by colleagues or clients or even friends and family because it can be seen as rude and unnecessary. So, getting feedback from me is vital to improvement. Typically, I don’t have to ‘correct’ as such, just highlight and ask the student to correct themselves.
My students.
My target market are professionals who use, or want to use, English. They will have learnt English in the past, they can probably talk all day long about the grammar rules etc. but when it comes to speaking and comprehension, they feel they have a gap.
They want to sound professional when they speak English, in the same way they do when they speak their native language.
They don’t want to miss key points in a meeting because they are trying to figure out what that phrasal verb meant.
And they would love to be able to speak English without an obvious accent.
My goal (your gift).
2025 is the year that I will move from mainly sub-contracting to mainly finding my own clients and so, to my request – I am fairly certain that all of my LinkedIn network are native English speakers – I ask that you share this post with any of your network that might help me access a non-native-English-speaking network.
Thanks in advance 😀 and have a good one.
