Hello, I am a CELTA qualified British English Accent coach with a First Class Honours Degree in Modern Languages and many years experience teaching both Received Pronunciation (Oxford English) and Modern Southern Standard British. My students come from all over the world and my speciality is accent softening based on a student's first language and their individual requirements. I find online tuition particularly suited to this. Please see the reviews from some of my students r.

About Me

Online teaching through Zoom or Skype is brilliant for accent reduction and pronunciation lessons! So, if you are finding you lack confidence in your English speaking skills, worry about your accent or keep needing to repeat yourself, now is an ideal time to seek professional help - tailored specially for you - towards a clearer, easily understood Standard Southern British accent or conventional Received Pronunciation. Once you find yourself speaking with assurance and confidence, you will quickly come across as the person you really are. 

I also offer editing of presentations, dissertations, articles etc and targeted tuition for the IELTS exams, specialising in writing tasks 1 and 2 (General or Academic) as well as the speaking component. 

My methods are right up to date. In addition to helping with general English, I install a sure knowledge of the 45 different sounds of English – that’s right 45 – and, where helpful, their various phonetic symbols. (There are only 26 alphabet letters, by the way!) At the same time, I use short videos and transcriptions, advertisements, story telling, humour, games, diagrams, muscle exercises, texts, poetry, conversations and dialogues to practise the melody and stress of British English and make sure you acquire excellent presentation skills. 

The very first lesson will acquaint you with the 45th sound, the schwa /ə/, the most common vowel sound in British English but one that has no alphabetic synbol, only a phonemic one. From there you will learn how to stress and destress words in sentence chunks, how to modulate the pitch of your voice, how to convey extra meaning simply by altering your intonation. Ear training is very important and listening skills are given as much attention as speaking through use of games and audio texts. 

For any of you particularly anxious to improve your general English skills, I aim to teach these as needed through the medium of pronunciation lessons. 

One of my students was with me for four years. Not a very good advertisement for rapid progress, you might say, but I think she just enjoyed coming – those were the days before lockdown – and, from being a simple university student, she now holds down an excellent job where she is regularly called upon to speak in public. 

My fees are flexible, depending on students' means, and I am very generous with my time. My suggested rate is £70 an hour, but I often advise taking a 90+ minute session for £85. I have found this represents by far the best value for money without demanding too long a concentration span. I also cannot stress highly enough how important it is for you to be willing to put in the extra regular work on your own at home. Handouts and audio material are regularly supplied - these days as email attachments. 

Still not convinced? Send me an email preferably stating your first language and a few details about yourself and what you wish to achieve or give me a ring (remembering to leave your number in your message please) and we can discuss your needs on the phone or over Zoom. I have taught all sorts of people and all sorts of nationalities privately and in language schools for many years and am confident that even one pronunciation session can be of benefit. I would add, too, that I have found online to be a brilliant way of improving your accent wherever you come from. Three of my more distant students take or took lessons from as far away as Taiwan, Japan and Australia. 
 

Services

Although I trained originally as an English and modern languages teacher, I have been specialising for a long time now in accent reduction and helping students around the world from all walks of life to pronounce British English with a clear and confident Standard British accent that allows them to blend in if they so wish. I teach both the older form of Received Pronunciation (actors please note) , it's modern variant or Southern Standard British English. You can find me at IDEA, the international Dialects of English Archive, under speciality accents https://www.dialectsarchive.com/received-pronunciation-5

My courses are adapted to the first language and individual needs of each student and are tailor-made to meet a student's particular interests and background. Thus, we'll use up-to-date articles from American or British newspapers (the Atlantic, the New York Times, the European, the Economist etc) to discuss current affairs, history, art, biology, anthropology, medical science or whatever, and videos, podcasts, speeches and readings from English literature to analyse and imitate different speakers' ways of talking. First, however, I assure a thorough grounding in the phonemes of the desired accent, using charts, phonetic symbols (easy to master) and mouth diagrams as well as a host of targeted sentences. Poetry, too, is really helpful for practising emphasis and intonation and I make extensive use of both serious and light hearted verse from the Renaissance to the present day. Points of English grammar, idioms and vocabulary are tackled as they arise and I aim to give students, through text and prose and general chit- chat, a feel for British culture and institutions- the history of the British Language, our educational system.

I have been teaching English since the age of eleven, when I was detailed to help the kids from France and Germany who came to stay with us. I have tutored classes or one to one in Higher Education and for many language schools and even ran my own (Lingua Team) for a number of years.

My own education includes the upper level of the so-called Computer Driving Certificate, a first-class Honours Degree in modern languages from UCL, the CELTA teaching certificate, level A, and specialist training from the British Council and others in both IELTS and pronunciation teaching.

I am very generous with my time and spend a lot of extra thought devising and preparing each lesson to keep the courses up to date and relevant. Generally, for those with the time and stamina, I recommend 90 minutes sessions (at reduced cost), otherwise one hour at least weekly. It is also highly advisable for swifter progress that students take a little time out of their busy schedules to skim though the recorded lessons again and to do the revision homework, preferably a few minutes a day.