Jeanie Languages About me

About me

I was born in South Brazil and moved to England in February 2000 to learn English and ended up getting married. I live in Newport, Shropshire with my husband and our 2 children. I speak Portuguese, English, Italian and Spanish and can teach them too. I have a Physical Education teaching degree from ESEF - UFRGS - a federal university in south Brazil.

I learned Spanish when I started traveling to Argentina to play Faustball when I was a teenager and I always liked talking to the Argentinians that used to come to visit south Brazil. 

Before moving to England, I spent 3 years learning Italian up to Advanced level. I always wanted to learn Italian because one of my great-grandmothers was Italian. When I arrived in England I did not speak much English and wanted to talk Italian to everybody I came across. My first real opportunity to really speak Italian properly was when I spent two weeks traveling by car in Italy, which was great.

While teaching PE and working as a cover teacher in a secondary school in London, I was invited to help some Portuguese students to gain GCSEs and A Levels in Portuguese. After that, they discovered that I could also speak Spanish and Italian, so I was asked to help the South American and Italian students to gain GCSEs and A levels in both languages respectively.  I did this for 5 years. It was great to be able to help the students to gain a good mark, especially for those who could not do well in other subjects. TES Article about home languages

With my knowledge of languages I was invited to run beginners' classes for languages and also to run and to be a facilitator for the "Cambridge Latin Course". It was intended that I use a DVD created by the Classics department at Cambridge University to facilitate the lessons, but as it was the first year the DVD was not completely ready, so I had to learn Latin too to be able to teach them. I ran the course for 4 years.

When I moved to Shropshire I started teaching Latin and Italian at Shrewsbury College and Portuguese at University College, Birmingham. I also started teaching lessons one to one at my house.