Hello! Hola!
I am a bilingual speaker of English and Korean. I am also fluent in Spanish (my mother grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina).
In high-school, I took five years of Latin and scored a 4 on the AP Latin (Virgil). I also took Spanish from 6th-12th grade. Before taking AP Spanish as a senior, I spent a summer with a host-family in Barcelona, Spain.
In 2010, I graduated from Northeastern University with a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics. Many of my classes focused on phonology and phonetics, which are the studies of the sounds we make when we speak. The ability to apply these fields to teaching correct pronunciation is an advantage I may have over other ESL teachers.
Throughout my undergraduate education, I gave one-hour tutoring sessions in Spanish as a foreign language through the Northeastern University peer-tutoring service. At this time, I was relatively unexperienced as a teacher.
After graduating Northeastern, I obtained a Cambridge CELTA certificate (to teach English as a foreign language to adults).
From January 2010 to August 2011, I worked as an EFL teacher in a small private academy in Madrid, Spain.
I gave three different group classes and many private 1-on-1 lessons at the academy.
Because the groups consisted of students who ranged from 10 year-olds to 17 year-olds and from beginner level to advanced level, I was able to adapt to each groups' needs and use my EFL training to develop effective lesson-plans tailored specifically for each group. My goal as a teacher was to make sure that I could not only get the kids to have fun while learning, but also motivate the students to learn English as a foreign language.
The private 1-on-1 lessons were much more different dynamically. In fact, I preferred 1-on-1 sessions because I believe that lessons should be based on the learning style of the student. Whether the student is more of a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner, I feel that private tutoring sessions are the best way for me to help a student learn the target language.
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