In short
My name is Héloïse, I am 35, I live near Nantes (France), and I am a French teacher (FLE): I teach French to foreigners, and I specialise in teaching French to live and work in France. My great satisfaction is to be able to support people in their projects, to give them some means to lead their lives as they wish.
I am a professional French teacher: I am qualified – Master 1 in Didactics of French as a Foreign Language with honours – and I have taught in Spain, Scotland and France. I am also qualified to give DELF and DALF exams (all levels).
I am passionate about interculturality, language variation especially in oral language, and active learning practices.
I speak French, Spanish and English.
Why I became a French teacher
I became a French teacher to help people become independent in their lives in France; more concretely, to give them the means and the desire to create social relationships, to live beautiful experiences, and to carry out their personal and professional projects.
I became a teacher of French as a foreign language to to accompany people: I understand the importance of language in the process of adaptation in a foreign country.
Then it makes sense that what I am most passionate about in my job is:
– interculturality: everything to do with the socio-cultural integration of people in a country, cultural differences, as well as the transformations of identity when living in another country,
– oral language and all its variations according to the more or less formal context, according to the generational, regional, etc. context, , and of course oral language learning, i.e. oral interactions, the understanding of French spoken in real life, pronunciation,
– instructional design: setting up learning paths using active approaches that enable people to better appropriate the language and culture.
My experience with languages
I teach French, but I have also learned languages! I currently speak three.
French is my mother tongue.
I started learning Spanish in high school, and then I continued to study it at uni, and I got a degree in Spanish Studies. Then I lived in Spain for 3 years, and that’s where I really learned to speak: when I arrived I was told “you speak like a book”! Now I’ve been speaking Spanish every day for 14 years. I have reached a C1 or C2 level.
I first got in touch with English as a child, with books and tapes that my mum would buy for me. I then started learning English in high school, and continued to study it during my university studies as an extra subject. From 2011 to 2015 I lived in Scotland. I now have a B2 level.
I would like to keep on improving my English, and start learning a new language, but I don’t know which one yet.
My experience from a country to another
My first experience of living in a country other than France was in Spain. First Almería, then Granada. After the south of Spain, I went to the north of Scotland: to Aberdeen, and then to Edinburgh. Finally, I returned to France.
When you move from one country to another, from one culture to another, your identity changes and is transformed. There is always a period of adaptation to the new place, which can be more or less long and more or less difficult, because the organisation of life is different, the daily habits are different, the way of communicating is different, the climate is different, and so on. You adapt little by little, and in the process you end up belonging to two cultures, or rather a mixture of the two: your culture of origin and your culture of adoption. You become multicultural.