English Tutor Vancouver

My fascination with language first emerged when I was fourteen years old during a student exchange to France. I had studied French for three years and thus had a limited but basic grasp of the language. After about a week in France, when I was getting ready to go to bed one night, I suddenly noticed that my internal self-talk, that is, the thoughts we have in our mind, were in French! That self-talk was basic, almost child-like as my knowledge of French was very limited, but it was in French. I was fascinated by how this could be. I realized then that I had a great interest in languages and that I not only wanted to learn them but also had a keen desire to know more about how languages are taught and learned.  

When I was a teenager living in Germany, I began tutoring in high school. I gave German and English lessons to several Turkish girls who were a few years younger than me focusing on German grammar and orthography. I also helped them with English, which I had begun to learn in grade seven. After moving to Canada and mastering English in my early twenties, I began to work as a private tutor for students from other countries who had come to Canada to study English. However, I also taught and tutored friends who wanted to know more about German. These sessions were mostly for fun, but already back then I realized that different people learned differently and not everyone had the same speed or ability to pick up words and sounds.

Later, after I had come across the field of linguistics at university, that is, the study of the structures and sounds of all languages in the world, I realized that learning about languages was my passion. I became fascinated by different aspects of linguistics, for example, how words are made up (morphology), how sentences are constructed (syntax), how words create meaning (semantics), how sounds behave in certain environments with other sounds (phonology), how sounds in the mouth and throat are created (phonetics), and how languages are learned and best taught (second language acquisition). I became particularly interested in English pronunciation and understanding the different ways languages are learned and taught.

One of the enjoyable parts about teaching is the process of showing or explaining a concept in language and to watch the expression of concentration on students’ faces while they try to grasp a new concept. Suddenly, at the moment in which they comprehend, the expression miraculously changes from sincere concentration to a bright shine and the expression of understanding in the eyes. It doesn’t always come quickly, but when it comes, there is nothing more fulfilling than to have helped a person be one step closer to being able to express his/her thoughts in a new language. Those are the rewards of my profession: To see students beam with pride because they are able to communicate and express themselves. It gives me immense satisfaction to be able to spread the joy of using another language in order to talk about the world, our opinions, feelings and experiences. 

I remember when I was studying Spanish in my early 20s. I didn’t put a lot of effort into studying vocabulary because everything came so easily to me in class due to knowing French. I thought for some reason I’d be exempt from having to memorize vocabulary. The result was that I was an active student when it came to new material, but I had an almost non-existent ability to use the words that our class had studied previously.   

One incident in class embarrassed me so much that I remember it vividly even over 25 years later. One of my classmates was a likable guy in his early 40s. He studied hard, and it was obvious that moving within the foreign language wasn’t easy for him. I, on the other hand, had fun repeating and imitating the words and phrases the teacher introduced. One day, the teacher introduced the word for “shade”. Always interested in languages, I asked whether there existed a similar distinction between “shade” and “shadow” in Spanish as it existed in English. My aforementioned classmate laughed out loud and exclaimed: “She can’t even string a sentence together saying ‘How far away is the train station’ but asks for tiny differences in the meaning of words? Hilarious!” I laughed it off, but really, it hit me that he was right: I needed to study at home if I wanted to make any progress with my communication skills instead of only being entertained by new words and phrases in class.  

A few weeks after this incident, I went on a trip to England and studied vocabulary on a long train ride. When I came back and joined the class, I was able to participate with a few sentences. The teacher looked at me in happy surprise and remarked that I must have studied vocabulary. He had noticed immediately. Now that I am a teacher myself, I can relate to his observation. I find it easy to tell whether a student has studied and at the same time remind my students that without an effort put into studying vocabulary, they won’t be able to expand their ability to express themselves.