English Writing Tutor | British English lessons & Accent reduction
Native English ESOL Tutor - Writing, Conversation & Accent Reduction
As your personal online tutor, I will guide you on your English language journey, revealing the mindset and linguistic habits of the native English speaker
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Getting to Know Each Other
My name is Phil, an online English tutor and native speaker of English, born and raised in Birmingham, UK. I currently share my time between the UK and the beautiful town of Sulmona in Italy. I am a trained teacher who has spent 20 years working in numerous educational settings, helping to shape the lives of learners from all over the world. I have a passion for languages and having studied Italian and Farsi for a number of years, I am entirely familiar with the struggles a language learner may encounter.My teaching has been shaped by my love of literature and whilst focussing largely on the writing process, I also specialise in accent reduction and in providing a safe and effective space for developing your conversational skills.You can view the lesson options by accessing my calendly page. Should you wish, you will also be able to access resources such as the 'Write-On-Track' course and the 'Accent Reduction Pack'.
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Have you recently moved to/or planning to start a new life in an English Speaking Country?
Are you learning English for pleasure and wish to improve your writing skills?
Do you have a passion for literature but don't know where to start with English Literature?
Are you looking to reduce your accent and speak a more natural style of British English?If one of the above applies to you (or if you simply wish to develop your conversational skills), by following the link to my calendly page, you will be able to select the lesson that is right for you!
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For further information, feel free to contact me via WhatsApp:
+44(0)797 5987108
or email:
[email protected]Should you wish to book your free 30 minute lesson, please access my calendly page:
www.calendly.com/teacherpdb
Blog#1 - Should my language teacher be a native speaker or someone who speaks my own language?
26 June 2026Since I started on my own language learning adventures approximately a decade ago, a question I have been continuously asking myself (particularly in the early stages when I was choosing my first tutor), is should I be learning from a native speaker or someone who speaks my own language?It is a question that crops up all the time when reading comments on language learning forums or when scanning YouTube and various other platforms for new and interesting language content.The answers vary. Some are adamant that it needs to be a native speaker, or how else will you truly replicate the nuances of your target language?Others will argue that if you are encountering a particular difficulty over a grammar point or a structure that doesn’t exist in your own language, how can this be explained to you clearly and fully by someone who doesn’t speak your language? A compatriot, surely, having faced the same difficulties in their own language learning journey some years earlier, are best placed to explain, in the clearest possible terms, how to overcome these barriers.So, should I go native or stick with the familiar?By sharing with you a particular difficulty I encountered when learning Italian a few years ago, will, I hope, illustrate the point a little more clearly. I would like you to consider the following phrase, written in the present perfect progressive tense:I have been learning Italian for 2 yearsI remember all to well those extremely uncomfortable conversations in the early days. I felt that I was ready to start conversing freely with Italians, however, as occurs to us all, I was paralysed with fear when the moment arrived to open my mouth. One particular structure was my nemesis. A local would ask me for how long I had been learning Italian and, thinking with my English hat on, I wanted to respond I have been learning Italian for 2 years. So many sentences in English, it seemed to me, were constructed using the present perfect progressive!!!It has been raining for over a month now
He has been waiting there for at least an hourLet’s break this down - I have been learning Italian for 2 years
I (subject)
have been (present perfect auxiliary)
learning (present participle)What does this mean?
It started in the past
Has continued up to the present
May still be continuing nowI encountered all manner of problems when trying to express sentences of this kind in Italian because a very different structure exists.In Italian it would be most naturally translated to:
Studio Italiano da 2 anni‘Studio’ is the present indicative of the verb ‘to study’So in short, in Italian, to express an action that started in the past and is continuing now, you would use the present indicative + da (to then indicate the length of time).
Whilst a progressive tense does exist in Italian, there is no direct equivalent to the present perfect progressive.This I am sure would create similar levels of confusion for an Italian learning English as it did for me learning Italian.For those of you learning English, consider these two sentences:He has been a teacher for 20 years
They have been to RomeThese sentences are in the present perfect tense rather than the present perfect progressive, however, I have selected them because they present an interesting point of discussion (and confusion) for someone learning English.Both of these sentences are, I am sure you will agree, examples of the present perfect tense that include the verb ‘to be’. Therefore, they contain ‘has been/have been’ within them, as ‘been’ is the past participle of the verb ‘to be’.For the first example ‘He has been a teacher for 20 years’ it all seems reasonably clear. As an English student, you have arranged the sentence in your head (in your native language) and you start to construct it in English by applying the necessary grammatical rules and correctly conjugating the verb ‘to be’. It is immediately clear to you that the verb ‘to be’ is the verb that you need!Look at the second example ‘They have been to Rome’. When preparing the sentence in your head, prior to translating it into English, you feel sure that you will need to verb ‘to go’ or ‘to stay’!!! Unfortunately, in this example, the verb ‘to be’ is being used in an idiomatic expression.And English does this to us time and time again. And it is true of other languages too! There is always an exception to the rule, always another potential barrier to our understanding.So to return to my original question, who is best placed to explain to the learner all of these exceptions that exist within our target language? Certainly, if you are at the early stages of learning a language, someone who could explain to you in your own language exactly how it all works (the grammatical conventions/the exceptions to the rule etc.) would be beneficial. Perhaps, more importantly, somebody who speaks your language would also be able to anticipate such problems before they even strike you as being a problem. Remember, they too have trodden the same path as you are now taking!!So where does this leave the native speaker?The single, most valuable quality that the native teacher possesses, is in fact, the very opposite of that which I have just identified as being the greatest strength of the non-native teacher. The native teacher perhaps won’t be able to identify all of the potential misunderstandings you may have as a learner of their language, but the beauty is, they will provide you with a continuous stream of vocabulary and sentence structures (idiomatic or otherwise) in a completely natural and authentic way, without it ever being forced. The secret is, however, to not waste weeks and even months listening to such authentic input from your native tutor, without completely understanding what it represents.So what is the answer?In short, my experience of language learning has taught me that, from the outset, it is beneficial to have 2 teachers. One of them being a native speaker and the other, someone who speaks my own language. Obviously, the latter will be able to speak my target language to a very high standard.This is something I didn’t do when I first started to learn Italian, and I wasted a lot of time following the well-intentioned advice of ‘expose yourself to as much comprehensible input as possible’. This was of course hugely beneficial, but by doing this I was seeing and hearing a lot of expressions and grammatical idiosyncrasies that I thought I was understanding, but the reality was, I was only understanding them in a passive manner within the wider context. Great for developing my listening skills but less so for when I needed to speak in Italian myself.To this you might very well say, well weren’t you studying Italian grammar? Yes, I was, but there were always certain things that weren’t entirely clear, and when asking for advice from my native Italian teacher, even though she was a fantastic teacher, the explanation of some concepts just didn’t stand up to being translated from Italian. They didn’t address the doubts and uncertainties that existed in my head. An English speaking head complete with my own linguistic biases and limitations!Of course this may not be true for everyone, and I know many people who insist on learning exclusively from a native speaker. Everyone must find the approach that works best for them. What I am now doing with Farsi (and again should I look to take on any new languages in the future), is to have both a native teacher and someone who speaks my own language. The latter can both explain and, more importantly, anticipate the problems I am likely to encounter, thus allowing me to fully maximise the benefit of then working alongside a native speaker.I’m sure, like me, you’ve found in the past that the most effective way for a concept or new vocabulary ‘to stick’, is when it has been introduced to you in one particular setting and then, suddenly, it presents itself to you in a new setting. It’s like the reappearance of a long-lost friend in very pleasing circumstances. It sticks! Such eureka moments, I find, are far less frequent when conversing with just one person. They may have repeated the same concept for the umpteenth time or you may have poured over your notebook of ‘important things to remember’ relentlessly, only to find it is still a little out of reach. Multiple teachers, with different linguistic backgrounds and outlooks, can be combined by you the learner, to target your needs and maximise those ‘eureka’ moments!As I have said, a language learning journey looks different for everyone and there are many different factors that need to be considered, not least our own personal learning style. But for me, I am a strong advocate of the two-teacher-approach, as the benefits are many in terms of minimising the frustrations we all encounter on our language journey.