Jay Stonestreet

I am a versatile tutor and love getting to know new people. I like to be chatty and friendly with all my students so that we can get to know each other and exchange ideas and cultures. I'm an open book, so ask me anything. I also love word games, and I frequently create new ones to play with students and friends alike. If you have any games you can share from your language, I'd love to hear about them!

To start in the first lesson, I'll give every student a short placement test that I have designed to find out where we need to focus your attention. If you have any specific requests about the direction of your learning, you can talk about them with me too. Together we can structure a set of lessons to get you where you need to be.

My upper-intermediate and higher level lessons usually revolve around some kind of text, video, song, piece of art, etc. I like to ask questions and see how you respond to them in verbal or written form. If we're doing just the basics and the lower intermediate, we can use specifically designed resources from the British Council and other coursebooks (such as Speak Out). I like to adapt activities from the coursebooks to suit my learners too, so that we're not just repeating the same boring exercises time after time.

I recently qualified for my CELTA (on top of my TEFL certificate), which has taught me a lot more about phonetics and pronunciation, so I would be really keen to incorporate more of this into my lessons and help students master their pronunciation. I'm also very interested in why learners make different types of errors in English when translating from their L1, so my approach to teaching will be backed up by study in my own time to try to anticipate and remedy your errors.

I'm also happy to tutor exam practice too for Cambridge exams!