French student in Liverpool with tutoring experience offering help with GSCE and A-Level.

Bethany's CV

I am a friendly, positive and confident university student studying French. With A* at GCSE and A at A-Level, I am confident that I can help students achieve their best in their exams. I have previous experience tutoring students through speaking exams using a variety of methods to help them learn in a way that suits them, successfully helping students who were not passing in mock exams receive high pass grades. I have techniques to help students prepare for speaking exams and written comprehensions, but I am also open to helping students work through whatever methods they prefer. Most of all I aim to give students more confidence with the French language; language classes in school can be daunting when you do not feel like you know what you are doing, and I try to make sure that my students feel confident and safe enough to try their very best.

For speaking exams, I would first help students to identify which areas they are struggling with the most, to be able to have targeted practice and exercise. I believe that repetition and lots of practice on potential questions is the best way to succeed in speaking exams. When pronunciation is poor, I find it is best to let students continue to answer their question before interrupting with their mistakes; I do not think it is productive to interrupt the flow of a student whilst they are trying to think/answer questions as it can really knock their confidence. A great way to improve pronunciation is to think of word groups with similar spellings that sound the same, and to identify why words/letter patterns sound the way they do.

For comprehensions, again practice is key. Using as many practice comprehensions as possible will really help a student to progress. I always like to go over comprehensions/exercises that students have done in class that they found difficult so that they can understand where they went wrong, and work with them to find methods that will help them with this type of question in the future. I also think it is important to improve on working out the gist of a paragraph from context. Students need not be daunted by a large paragraph of written/spoken french - they do not need to know every piece of vocabulary to be able to understand a text and answer a question, we can work on this together. It is however, important also to try to retain as much vocabulary as possible, as this will of course help too.

I would be delighted to help you through your French exams, and if you have any questions at all please do not hesitate to contact me.