Experienced and Professional ESL and German Tutor

Jeff V.

Hello, everyone!

I'd like to give a brief introduction - my name is Jeff (it really is, I'm not just quoting 21 Jump Street!) and I am an ESL-certified language teacher with nearly two decades of teaching experience in foreign language acquisition (besides English, I also have experience teaching German). Starting with being the lead German tutor at my university from 2004-2007 and moving to Thailand to be an English teacher from 2009-2015, I have helped many students of various ages and from all different sorts of backgrounds meet and exceed their language goals. Besides my experience as a teacher, I am also a freelance writer and translator, constantly improving my own abilities in both German and English.

My approach to teaching is simple: I'm a guide. What this means is that I don't believe in simply giving facts for students to memorize and repeat for a test. Learning is a life-long adventure and as a teacher, my duty is to inspire my students to be excited for that adventure. I make frequent use of socratic questioning and draw on my own experiences as a foreign language learner (apart from English and German, I can make my way around fairly well in Spanish, French, Thai, and Norwegian as well as speak a smattering of Tagalog and Italian). It is my strong belief that learning is not merely memorizing, but internalizing, and this can only be done when guided to discovering answers by oneself.