English Language Mentor
Guided Conversations
On the face of it, the phrase “English Language Mentor” might appear to be a bit of a cliché. Do read on, however, to find out why I see myself as a “mentor” as well as an English language teacher.
Why should you sign up for English Language Mentoring Sessions with me?
I hold the belief that a significant proportion of English language learners have reached a “dead end” in their quest to become proficient speakers of English. I am quite sure that many of you reading this cannot overcome the “intermediate plateau” and become more advanced speakers of English.
As an English language mentor, I am here to help you break those language barriers, gain confidence and ultimately achieve your goals. Above all, my mentoring sessions explore some of the best language learning strategies out there to help you learn English independently and become a competent speaker. I’ll be more than delighted to share my experience as to how I achieved proficiency in the Serbian language and a fairly advanced level of spoken Polish using some innovative language learning strategies.
When it comes to reaching the next level, I will show you that there is light at the end of the tunnel. That “dead end” can, in fact, be an opportunity to reflect, learn and grow.
Overall, my personalised guidance and support aims to promote the growth of every individual in both a linguistic and psychological sense.
English Language Mentoring – How it all started for me
Me as a language learner
As a teenager learning French at school, I was at the mercy of the Audio-Lingual Method. My teachers were simply content with drilling grammatical and phonological structures. After so many years of mechanical repetition, I was barely able to string five sentences together in French by the time I left school.
These days, I believe that I am capable of learning one language after another until I speak those languages fluidly – and all without the help of a tutor. With the strategies I have at my disposal, I know that I could speak Polish proficiently in just three or four months. Of course, I have had a great deal of contact with the language since 2006. However, I believe I can make that jump from a low-intermediate level to proficiency in such a short space of time. This is all due to the fact that I am fully aware of the whys and the hows of becoming an independent language learner.
All in all, I am self-dependent. I have a system. I know what steps I have to take in order to overcome the intermediate plateau in any language.
A huge imbalance
In contrast to the rapid manner in which I am able to pick up foreign languages, I might spend many years with English language students who do become more confident speakers, yet they fall short when it comes to producing extended stretches of speech which are both accurate and fluid.
In speaking classes with me, some of my learners are not able to retrieve all those wonderful lexical chunks and collocations which I know that they’ve memorised. I know why – they haven’t got a system or a language learning strategy to help process new chunks of language and collocations outside of class time.
There are days when I’m very self-critical. I think I’m a bad teacher because I’m not able to help my students master English in a year or two. After all, I picked up Serbian in one year. Then I ask myself – why do they keep making the same mistakes? Why aren’t they attempting to incorporate newly learned words and lexical chunks into their speech? After all, some of my students have been learning with me for over five years.
Quite simply, I need to help my students embrace the values of independent learning and the use of language learning strategies.
The FOUR Pillars of Successful Language Learning
My language learning philosophy revolves around FOUR basic pillars:
You can get a proficient speaker of English to check the sentences. The next step is to read through all the sentences at regular intervals (spaced repetition). The end goal is that you will benefit from the sentences being “on the tip of your tongue” in future conversations.
See how I have created personalised sentences for the collocation, hold a grudge:
hold a grudge (against someone)
EXAMPLE SENTENCES
* Sure there are are people I wouldn’t like to see again, but I wouldn’t say I hold a grudge against them
* I try to practice forgiveness instead of holding grudge
If you want lexical chunks and even entire sentences to be “swimming” in your brain, visualisation also helps. Make use of Google Docs and experiment with different fonts, font sizes, italics etc.:
hold a grudge (against someone)
EXAMPLE SENTENCES
*Sure there are are people I wouldn’t like to see again, but I wouldn’t say I hold a grudge against them
* I try to practice forgiveness instead of holding grudges
How can I help you as an English Language Mentor?
As an English Language Mentor, I am here to help people find their own preferred method of learning a language. I help everyone to pinpoint their own combination of resources and ways of learning to suit their needs. Following that, it is my duty to help learners persevere and achieve the desired results.
This is what I do:
I help mentees create their own sustainable language learning system which revolves around the implementation of language learning strategies
I take into account my mentees’ particular learning styles and then propose and demonstrate a small set of language learning strategies which they can rely on when learning English independently. I am particularly knowledgeable about vocabulary learning strategies.
I outline specific methods to learn English independently
All of my mentees will receive a detailed guide on how to use effective methods to learn English in their own time. For example, I teach people to turn the internet into an unlimited resource of learning materials and use it to their advantage.
I help English language learners to come out of the shell and become the risk takers they need to be if they want to attain fluency
If you want to overcome the intermediate plateau, you need to experiment with new ways of learning, attempt to integrate newly learned words and collocations into your everyday speech and embrace the power of being wrong. I will teach all about the benefits of being a risk-taker when learning a language.
I help English language learners to rise up against the grammatical syllabus
My job as an English language mentor is to help learners get away from the grammatical syllabus, namely the mastery of useless tenses which are more suitable for written English. I have never used the future perfect continuous in my life! Therefore, I will strip down the grammatical syllabus for you and guide you towards focussing only on the essentials, such as how to combine the present perfect and past simple tenses to describe life experiences.
