Teacher Edward G's Page

I come from a bilingual family: my father is English and my mother is Italian, and I consider myself a native speaker in both languages.
I qualified as a teacher of English as a second language ten years ago (CELTA), and I have taught ever since. Over the years I have worked in different countries, with students from all over the world, different backgrounds and levels of English.
As a teacher, I try my best to give my students the opportunity to speak as much as possible, and I normally prefer not to interrupt them while they are in the middle of a sentence. I like to give my feedback and correct mistakes when they have finished. This is especially useful when helping a student improve their fluency or prepare for an oral examination, such as IELTS, or Cambridge KET, PET, First and Advanced.
I strongly believe that the role of an English teacher is to encourage, stimulate and help students with difficult elements of the language. Students must also do their part, which is not limited to doing homework, but also reading books, articles, blogs and magazines, as well as watching TV series and films, videos on internet ecc. In my experience, when students do this in their own time, their improvement is usually great on all skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), not to mention all the new words and typical expressions of the English language they pick up along the way and learn.
I have taugh all levels, from Beginner to Proficiency, but I have specialised in a few specific sectors, and here I am going to list the main ones:
- IELTS, especially speaking and writing.
- Cambridge exams (PET, First, Advanced), especially use of English, speaking and writing.
- grammar (especially verb tenses and conditional sentences).
- pronunciation: it's not important what accent you have, what matters is that people can understand you. The more you work on clarity of single words, as well as sentence stress and intonation, the more you will be understood.