ENGLISH LANGUAGE
"Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom."
- Roger Bacon
My name is Jacob Kozub and I have been working as an English teacher for 10 years. I've graduated in English philology at the University of Warsaw with honors acquiring Master's degree. My methodology is based on the combination of CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), but mainly the Natural Approach (in short, comprehensible conversations). In my free time I read quite a lot of novels and non-fiction books, mainly about psychology, go for long walks with my dog in the woods and sing in a band.
I'd like to invite you to try individual classes via Skype or in person. I specialise in conductiving converstaional lessons, during which I write down all the words which are new and usable for my students. That being said, I'm also keen on taking a flexible approach, if you'd like to dedicate more time to repeating grammar I'm willing to do so. However, I strongly believe in learning by talking. In my practice as a teacher I've found that this method brings the greatest benefits. See you live or online!
LEARNER-CENTERED TEACHING
Methods of masters
PAOLO FREIRE
No one becomes a teacher on a Tuesday afternoon at four," says the eminent Brazilian educator, who has received 41 honorary doctorates, including from Oxford, Cambridge and Yale. Nobody is born a teacher or appointed as one. We become teachers, educators, we constantly develop as teachers, through practice and through reflection on practice. "If a teacher does not think too much about his profession, if he does it thoughtlessly, for example, if he reads the school material page by page, he will not become a good teacher. It is this attempt to understand how best to teach someone that gradually makes the teacher great. In my case, I have spent 10 years improving my teaching.
STEPHEN KRASHEN
The now retired American professor's theory of foreign language acquisition has shed new light on the methodology of teaching English. It is based on the premise that the process of native language acquisition can be repeated, with certain limitations of course, but still to a large extent. In contrast to the conventional method, it is usually subconscious, so that the student is not aware of the moment when he is assimilating individual elements of the language, or of the effects of that assimiliation. For a long time he will be a listener, a listener and not a speaker. So we should approach foreign languages in the same way as we learned our mother tongue. Treat the teacher as someone who is less shy than you are. But over time you will gain confidence and eventually you will take over and speak throughout the lesson. Learn With Us is all about having a good conversation in English.
NOAM CHOMSKY
This famous American linguist claims that the universal basis of all languages is grammar. Thanks to it, humans are able to create an infinite number of expressions based on a system of rules that he calls generative grammar. According to Chomsky, we have an innate ability to learn foreign languages. Steven Pinker, a proponent of this theory, claims that this innate generative grammar includes, among other things, syntactic rules (relating to the structure of the sentence), binary relations (organising how we can move words in the sentence), grammatical morphemes (determining time, aspect, modality, coincidence and negation) and lexical categories (such as a noun or an adjective). According to both Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, our brains are like computers with pre-installed language acquisition software. However, our programme can be updated and, as time goes by, it takes up more and more space on our hard drive. In our case, if we are frequent users of an application, we are always on the lookout for a premium version that has more features and for which we can often pay a lot of money. But with English, it is usually a worthwhile investment.
