English tutor in Monaco — CELTA-certified and native teachers

Which English are we actually working on?

“Help with English” covers at least four different projects, and they call for different lessons. Naming the right one is most of the work.

English as a school subject, French curriculum

Grammar, comprehension, written expression and the oral components of the brevet and the baccalauréat. Assessment here rewards accuracy and structure more than fluency.

English as the language of instruction

For pupils at the International School of Monaco or in an international section, where English is not a subject but the medium for everything else. Falling behind in English means falling behind in history and science too.

IGCSE English, IB English A and B

Text analysis, commentary structure, comparative essays and the oral assessments. These have their own conventions, and marks are lost to form as often as to content.

Confidence in speaking

Students who read and write well but freeze when they have to talk. This is a distinct problem with a distinct solution, and it responds quickly to the right practice.

How the lessons are built

Romain holds the Cambridge CELTA, the benchmark qualification for teaching English, and teaches in a task-based way: each session is organised around something the student needs to be able to do in English, not around a grammar point in the abstract.

Choose a situation
Presenting a project, arguing a position, following a science lesson, writing a commentary. Something recognisable from the student’s actual week.
Build the language for it
The vocabulary and structures that situation needs, put immediately into the student’s own sentences rather than memorised as a list.
Attempt it
A short performance — spoken or written — under conditions close to the real thing.
Correct one thing well
Feedback on a single chosen difficulty, then reuse of that correction in a new situation. Correcting everything at once corrects nothing.

On speaking, specifically

Vocabulary lists and conversation are related but not the same task. A student can know four hundred words and still be unable to hold a two-minute exchange, because retrieval under time pressure is a separate skill from recognition.

The remedy is short, frequent, slightly uncomfortable attempts — ninety seconds of speaking on a prepared topic, then questions the student has not seen — rather than longer study of the same material. Both Paul, a native English speaker with a Master’s in Education, and Romain, CELTA-certified with C2 English, work this way.

Native and certified teachers

Paul is a native speaker of both English and French, holds a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of Liverpool and a Cambridge teaching certificate, and has taught in secondary schools in the UK from KS3 to GCSE. Romain holds the CELTA and studied for a year at an American university, teaching French as a foreign language there. Between them they cover school English, exam English and professional English, for children and adults.

Frequently asked questions

Do you teach adults as well as children?

Yes. Romain teaches adults regularly, including professional English. Paul’s Cambridge certificate covers both adults and young learners.

My child is bilingual at home but scores poorly in school English.

This is common and not contradictory. Spoken fluency and written academic English are different competences; a bilingual child may speak effortlessly and still not know how to structure a commentary or use the register an examiner expects. That gap is quick to close once identified.

Can you prepare a child for an English-language school entrance assessment?

Yes, provided we know the format. Send us whatever the school has published about the assessment and we will tell you honestly whether we can prepare for it well.

Are lessons conducted only in English?

That depends on the level. With a beginner, some French makes the lesson far more efficient. As the level rises, lessons move to English throughout. Both tutors can work either way.