Agency

At the core of my teaching is one key notion, that of agency. I believe that learning a language is first and foremost about knowing what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how. Because when you do, no matter your level, you feel confident to speak. And the more you speak, the more language you acquire.

Agency isn’t about producing perfect sentences nor about sounding like a native speaker. Agency is trusting yourself to communicate, with an awareness of the fact that practising a language is the only way to become fluent. There needs to be short, awkward sentences to begin with, in order to get to more complex, more fluid ones.

Your conjugations can only improve if you use your verbs over and over again, your vocabulary can only expand if you read, listen, watch, if you pay attention to the language you’re exposed to and make a deliberate effort to recycle it the next time you speak.

Practising perfect sentences in theory is akin to having your feet stuck to the starting blocks, picturing the race. At some point, you need to throw yourself into it, slowly at first, but faster and faster every time after that.

At the end of the day, what is truly satisfying isn’t so much the speed at which you’re going, but the awareness of the fact that you are finally running.