French Language Tutoring with Academic Focus from Saint Louis University

Bonjour - hello! My name is Tim. I’ve been a student of French since high school and a teacher of it for seven years. I became enamored with the language and Francophone culture quite spontaneously but this love took me on the most exciting of paths, including three years living, studying, and teaching in Lyon and Poitiers, France. I have always admired the teachers who helped me grow in life as well as in language, and it’s this admiration which I strive to emulate in my classroom. Understanding and using a language is all about communicating with others in myriad places; therefore it’s important that I expose students to French in all its forms, contexts, and possibilities. My classes capture the targets of language learning in equal measure: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Moving from vocabulary to grammatical structure, my objective is to help my students build off each new foundation, growing in confidence and basking in the fun at the heart of language and culture. I am a proud grammar nerd but believe contemporary pop culture holds an equal value in learning a language today. Join me in building more connections with new people and places!

My teaching methods build off my lived experience in French speaking places and my own path confronting the challenges of language learning. I’ve used textbooks as a springboard in my formal classes, but awareness of their limitations led me to develop more dynamic and authentic interactions with language. Coming from a high school teaching background, I’ve balanced exercises with a wealth of images, videos, and games. For instance, verb conjugation becomes more lively and ingrained through battleship or dice play. I bring real restaurant and café menus to allow for role play skits, and use authentic web sites to practice skills like ordering a pizza, looking for a house, or booking travel arrangements. I’m most interested in language’s ability for you to express yourself: what do you like or dislike? How would you describe your friends? What did you do this weekend? What are your future goals? Along with this, I particularly enjoy demonstrating broader connections and clues buried among our native and target languages, aspects that can speed your learning and lend themselves to independent discoveries.