About Issai Teach

I am Issai and I created Issai Teach in 2021. I teach French, English and Morisyen online, and I create everything on this site myself. I hope that you find my resources helpful.

It is a small, one-person business, so if you book a lesson, it will be me teaching it.

What I do

Alongside teaching French, English as a second language and KS3 English at an independent online British school, I take a small number of private students.

Privately, that tends to be:

  • French, from Key Stage 3 through GCSE, IGCSE, A Level and International A Level, as well as adults and complete beginners
  • English and EAL, covering reading, writing, speaking and listening for first-language and additional-language students, and Cambridge B2 First
  • 11+ English and Verbal Reasoning, for 7+, 11+ and 13+ entrance exams
  • Morisyen (Mauritian Creole), for heritage speakers, families with Mauritian roots, travellers and anyone curious about the language

Students are aged seven upwards, including adults. Home-educated students are very welcome, and I can usually help with finding an exam centre if a student needs to enter as a private candidate.

Qualifications

  • Secondary MFL PGCE with QTS, Institute of Education, UCL
  • TEFL, 120 hours, Institute of Education, UCL
  • Linguistics graduate and Applied Linguistics postgraduate, Birkbeck, University of London
  • Qualified teacher for seven years, teaching online since 2019
  • Working across Edexcel, Cambridge International, AQA and AP specifications, at GCSE, IGCSE, IAL, A Level and AP

For families in the United States

Lessons can often be paid for with funding a family already has: an education savings account, a microgrant, a state scholarship, or a district or charter school allotment. I am an approved provider across a number of these, including programmes in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming, along with several Alaska districts and charter schools. The route differs from one programme to the next, and in some cases funding reaches me through a platform where my classes are listed rather than directly.

Almost none of them work like an ordinary card payment. There is a full breakdown on its own page, with every programme linked and a note on how each one pays.

Using US education funding for lessons

How I teach

None of what follows is original to me. It is fairly well established in language teaching research, and it is simply what I have found tends to work, including in lessons where earlier approaches of mine did not.

Chunks rather than word lists

Vocabulary lists and a grammar rule will get a student some way, but the sentences tend to arrive late. Fluent speakers appear to store and retrieve whole phrases, or chunks, rather than rebuilding each sentence from its parts while someone waits for an answer.

So lessons tend to start from chunks: usable phrases with the grammar already inside them and working. The analysis comes afterwards.

A good deal of listening

New language is usually met in the ear before it is met on the page, and well before anyone is asked to say it. Students hear a structure many times, in different contexts, until it becomes familiar.

Not background listening, though. Each listening task has something to do attached to it: picking which version you heard, spotting the difference between two, deciding whether two things mean the same, writing down a fragment, catching the one word that changed. Listening tends to be the skill students get least of, and it is often the most improvable.

Grammar, taught explicitly and in sequence

Chunks are not grammar by osmosis. Grammar is taught directly, named and taken apart, and it is sequenced so that each structure builds on something already secure.

What differs is the order. A student meets a structure working, hears it many times, and then has it explained, rather than being handed a rule and asked to apply it before having much feel for how it sounds. The explanation seems to land better when there is already something for it to explain.

Small tasks, lots of them

New language is rarely explained once and practised once. It is met again and again in short tasks that ask a student to do something with it: matching, correcting, reordering, translating a fragment, spotting the odd one out.

Each task is small, and each asks the student to process the language rather than copy it. That builds up the exposure that acquisition seems to need, and it keeps the student working rather than listening to me talk. Production comes once the language is familiar.

Planning from the specification

For exam students, lessons are planned from the assessment objectives and the mark scheme rather than from whatever a course book covers next.

In practice that means paying attention to things like the supporting text that comes with AQA's English-into-French translation, or the fact that the GCSE dictation deliberately includes words from outside the vocabulary list. That sort of detail sits in the specification rather than in a textbook, and it is worth marks.

Why everything here is free

There are a lot of guides on this site: exam breakdowns for every board, grammar and vocabulary references, translation practice with model answers, and full self-paced courses. None of it is behind an email address or a paywall.

Specification detail is the sort of thing that should not really cost money. And a student who has worked through the free material before booking a lesson already has a sense of what they need, which tends to make the lesson more useful for both of us.

If the free guides turn out to be all you need, that is a good outcome. Several of them say where tutoring is probably not the answer.

Morisyen

Morisyen, or Mauritian Creole, is the everyday language of most of Mauritius, and it is rather hard to find a proper course for.

I am slowly putting one together: structured levels, written materials, and the standardised orthography published in 2011 rather than the ad hoc French-influenced spellings that fill search results. Learners often assume the language has no rules. It does, along with an academy and a reference grammar.

It is slow work and not especially commercial, but there is not a great deal else out there, and heritage speakers who can understand their grandparents but not answer them deserve more than a phrasebook.

Beyond lessons

I also write curriculum as well as teach it: schemes of work, assessment materials and lesson resources across French, English and Morisyen. And I read a fair amount of educational research, particularly on language teaching.

I am based in North West London and teach in the UK timezone.

On a personal note

I love dogs, small and big. I have two small chihuahuas who like to make an appearance in class when they can. I cook, I garden, I draw mandalas, and I learn about other cultures through travel, food, music and comedy.

Where to start

If you would like to talk something through, there is a free 15-minute call. Add it to your basket and check out, the total is £0, and you will receive an email with a link to choose a time. It is a conversation rather than a sales appointment, and there is no obligation to book anything afterwards.

Otherwise, please do get in touch and tell me what you are trying to do.