Ellen Clarke

I have experience tutoring GCSE Spanish and beginner-level Spanish to adults. I have a Master's degree in Portuguese and Spanish from the University of Glasgow, where I achieved distinctions in Spoken exams. I have an advanced level of both languages and use them regularly as a community interpreter working with Latin Americans.

I currently teach a free class for adults at a beginner level and lead them through classes that develop their reading, writing, and speaking, while ensuring they centre on topics that interest them. I believe that when learning a language, the most important thing is having the motivation to improve, which can only be sustained if you feel you're learning things that are useful to your aims with the language.

I like to make sure that lessons are dynamic, constantly mixing skills and circling back to areas of difficulty. Producing your own sentences and ideas, starting off by writing them and slowly transitioning to more spontaneous speech, is key to developing language quickly. Equally, reading is foundational to consumption and can greatly improve the more subtle syntactic skills that help us recognise patterns and rules within a language.
Overall, language learning has to be fun, and for me at least, it must make me excited to speak and connect to the culture. Practising in an environment where you aren't afraid to make mistakes and can develop your thinking in another language is essential to moving from being too shy to speak to people to interacting meaningfully in your target language.