About me
Master's Degree
10+ years experience
CELTA certificate
Comenius University, Slovakia, 2006
CELTA certificate
10+ years experience
CELTA certificate
ECC, Thailand, 2009
10+ years experience
10+ years experience
10+ years experience
Predominantly Europe & Asia.
References
Stuart Gale
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Gia Mamulashvili
Head of the teacher training
ECC, Thailand (2009)
Gia Mamulashvili
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Gia Mamulashvili
Director
Teach & Learn Georgia (2012)
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Director of NGA Program
American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (2015)
Anzhelika Dziubko
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Dr. Elisabeta Zelinka
Managing director
ASAP language school
Chernivtsi, Ukraine (2018)
Sandra Ruei King
Deniss Semibratovs
Sandra Ruei King
CEO of Phoenix Group Asia
Taoyuan, Taiwan (2020)
Betti Sewell
Deniss Semibratovs
Sandra Ruei King
Director of Studies
International House (Satva)
Riga, Latvia (2022)
Deniss Semibratovs
Deniss Semibratovs
Deniss Semibratovs
Improved reading score from 33/50 to 49/50 and passed LanguageCert Achiever (High Pass) after only 4 sessions.
Riga, Latvia (2022)
What I believe in
Home work is where the learning happens
There is nothing more important in language acquisition than creativity. While the students cannot possibly vie for attention from native speakers the same way infants and babies receive comprehensible input from their parents 24/7, they can easily outmatch them in playing with the language — and in a significantly more useful and structured manner. I am a strong supporter and foster creative, open-ended homework, whereby students can experiment with language and no single answer is binary – wrong or right. They are merely various approaches to attack the problem.
Storied learning
As part of my teaching duties, I encourage, or even require students to keep their own blogs, where they can post their essays and other homework to challenge each other – and for posterity's sake. Looking back over the course of the semester (or school-year) they can discover how surprisingly quickly their critical abilities can improve if they put in consistent work. It's absolutely essential that the students consciously take over ownership of home tasks to arrive at the by then almost inevitable feeling of inescapable responsibility for own development.
Bookworms
When even the parents do not have more than a half-an-hour daily to spare for their children's sake, how can we achieve at least partial immersion in the English language and its related culture? What is the perfect candidate for comprehensive input that our learning machines (brains) crave so much?
The answer is reading and the means is a methodical semester-long project requiring regular input, like a bookworms club. Incorporating graded readers into students' curricular activities keeps them engaged and at the forefront of learning without them even realizing it. There is very little use of memorizing words outside of context; books offer vocabulary precisely following natural language occurrence (frequency), while at the same time offer contextual clues to expand vocabulary almost effortlessly.