Why should you choose us as your English teachers?
You might ask, and rightfully so, why are we offering to accompany your English language-acquisition journey? What is it that allows us to put ourselves before you and ask that you trust us with your time, money and energy, when you barely know us?
Here's a quick read, a sort of background story to our language journey and how it has made us the teachers, and the people, that we are today.
Besides our respective Masters Degrees and our Cambridge certifications in teaching English, what makes us the right people to have at your side and leading the way?
Quite simply, because we've been in your shoes. When we first moved to Italy, we knew words and phrases, could even make some decent sentences after a glass of wine at aperitivo time. But everything else came through a long process of language (and culture) acquisition. As language teachers, we had a relatively clear idea of what steps to take to become more fluent, while improving our accuracy.
It doesn't necessarily mean that we followed them very well or that the process was any easier. Indeed, the fact that we spend most days speaking solely in English for the entire day made things a lot more complex for us back then; clearly, our expectations of full immersion into Italian life were actually rather far from the truth. Add to that our heightened awareness, as language teachers, of our own shortcomings as students, and the result was frequently annoyance.
Back in February 2016, lesson planning at a cafeteria during our Cambridge teaching course on a Sunday. We were exhausted here, but everything just felt so right. After years of theoretical study, we were finally starting to put our knowledge into practice - the adrenaline rush from that saw us through various sleepless nights and never-ending days and our smiles never wavered.
Literal years passed before we could have a proper conversation on the phone, particularly if it involved something technical or not particularly commonplace. But, eventually, we got there, and besides Italian, we learnt a whole lot about how best to learn a language. Many times, we remarked about how ironic it was that, as language teachers, we found ourselves in this situation. But it was during those moments (or perhaps later, after the whole argument with the idraulico - plumber in English, and the p is not pronounced - was finally resolved), that we truly became better teachers. It was then that we really understood what our students experience and recognised how frustrating it could be at times, and we learnt the most important lesson of all, first hand: making mistakes is a crucial part of the language acquisition process, and therefore, so are patience and time.
And it is this experience and this knowledge, alongside our professional qualifications and years of experience in the classroom (physical and virtual), that make us confident in our ability to help you achieve your goal of being successful in English.