Description: Isabella is a language enthusiast and is a tutor in French, Portuguese and Spanish. She is a graduate of The University of Warwick with a degree in Modern Foreign Languages. Here’s a snippet of her tutor profile.
My interests revolve mainly around languages, I am currently learning Beginner’s Italian which I am very excited about – I have also made some Italian friends who I am practising my speaking skills with, and in turn they practice their English with me.
I also love watching TV shows in different languages, for example I have just finished watching a Russian TV show about Technological Advancement and Artificial Intelligence – which expanded my Russian vocabulary immensely! I have also started working on translating Lermontov’s Russian poetry collection into English – I did the same with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, and it was hard but extremely rewarding. I also love listening to Spanish music – in particular, Reggaeton.
Despite spending most of my time doing language related activities, I also love to paint and going to art exhibitions. My favourite art movement is impressionism, and my favourite artist is Vincent Van Gogh – I even bought a Vincent Van Gogh bobblehead which I love!
One of my favourite places to go in the summer in London is the Tate Modern – they always have really interesting exhibitions, right now they’re doing an exhibition of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms which I can’t wait to see! My favourite thing to paint tends to be portraits, especially when using acrylics, but I’ve developed a new interest in landscape painting, which I use watercolours for – particularly night paintings.
Teaching Experience
I have previously worked as a Portuguese Tutor at the University of Warwick organised by a student-led organisation called “Languages @ Warwick”. There, I taught beginner’s to advanced-level Portuguese to students who ranged between the age group of 18-22.
As a volunteer tutor, I had to organise my availability to match with the students who had requested lessons, often I would have to tutor either 1-to-1 or in a group of 5.
This was a really rewarding experience as it enhanced their level of Portuguese as well as giving me an invaluable opportunity to share my language skills with others, in the end of the academic year all of the students I taught achieved either a 1st or a 2:1 in their Portuguese exam. In this role, I worked for an academic year during 2017-2018, I then resumed the same role in the academic year of 2019-2020.
I was also an informal English tutor whilst I lived abroad in Russia and in France during the academic year of 2019-2020, where I taught English to school-aged children in France and then to university-aged adults in Russia.
In France, I worked as a part-time au-pair, where I was in charge of helping with primary school-level homework three times a week over a period of 5 months. This covered a range of subjects, including Science, Maths, Literature and English. Given their age, tutoring lessons had to be varied in order to gauge interest. Thus, I used a variety of resources to help them understand their homework, such as videos, and props.
In Russia, I joined another student-led language club to exchange English lessons for Russian lessons. Unlike France, the age-range was much older, therefore the themes and subjects we used in our oral lessons ranged between politics, philosophy and current affairs.
Additionally, as their level of English was advanced, in contrast to the beginner’s level of English I had previously taught, our classes focused largely on more complex grammatical structures and writing.
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