Every lesson starts with one question: who are you, and where do you want to use your English?
An approach that adapts to you
Level, needs, pace — everything adapts to the person, never the other way round.
Speaking comes first
I work on all four skills — listening, reading, speaking, writing — but with a real centre of gravity: speaking. Understanding what's said to you, knowing how to respond. A bit of reading too. Writing stays secondary — unless you need it, for example to write emails, in which case we work on that too.
The English of your destination
For travellers, I adapt to the destination — every English-speaking destination, not just a few: the accent isn't the same from one country to the next, and neither is the vocabulary, quite. We get familiar with the dialect and pronunciation of the place, we listen to dialogues in that accent, so your ear is ready when you arrive. A few memories from students along the way: Lydie and Maxime came back from Scotland saying "aye" instead of "yes", and "wee" instead of "small". Sophie flew off with her family to the United States. Joahna, in Australia, learned that people ask for a "barbie" rather than "barbecue", and a "chook" rather than "chicken". And Pauline set course for Canada.
Real-life situations
Every time, the same principle: practical English, the kind used in real travel situations — the airport, the restaurant, checking in at a hotel, asking for directions, handling an emergency, and so on. We learn the vocabulary, we practise, we do role-play, we listen to dialogues.
For travel professionals
It's the same work, applied to their profession. We work on how to introduce themselves and their services, how to talk about their destination in English, how to open up to an international clientele who might want to, say, come and discover France, and how to communicate and collaborate with international partners — so they can move confidently in a profession geared towards the world.
For wedding professionals
It's the same process, applied to their field. I've mostly worked with wedding planners, designers and officiants so far, but I'm open to every wedding profession: caterers, venues, photographers, and more. We prepare everything they might need in front of an English-speaking couple — a venue visit, a menu presentation, a negotiation with a supplier — with the precise terminology of their trade. It's especially useful for destination weddings, where you need to know how to attract and reassure a high-end international clientele, from the first contact all the way to the big day.
Remembering pronunciation
And for every new word or phrase, the same rule: the term, its translation, and a pronunciation aid — not the phonetic alphabet, something simpler, designed to actually stick, tailored to each student's own language.