Italian in Gloucestershire

Magari. Seven letters that English needs a whole sentence for. It means maybe. It also means if only, and I wish, and possibly, and which one you are hearing depends almost entirely on the face being made while it is said. Adult learners tend to fall for that word. It lets them be vague in Italian long before they can be precise, and being allowed to be vague is half the battle.I live near Dursley. Lessons run over Microsoft Teams, which covers Stroud, Cheltenham, Gloucester and the villages in between without anyone having to drive in the dark. If you are close by, sitting in the same room can sometimes be arranged.

One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour over Microsoft Teams, at whatever time of day survives your week. That is most of what I do — one person, one set of reasons for learning, a plan built around both.There is also an online group for beginners; register your interest for the next one. The group is kept small. You will speak Italian in the first session, which alarms people beforehand and stops alarming them about eight minutes in.If you would rather ask than read, the number is 07786 107293 and I do answer it.

What Gloucestershire students usually want

I live near Dursley, under the western edge of the Cotswolds, with Gloucester one way and Bristol the other. Gloucestershire is not a market to me. It is the road I drive and the weather I get. Because I am here rather than somewhere theoretical, in-person can sometimes be arranged, depending on where you are and what hour we are talking about. The county is longer than it looks on a map, and a Cheltenham evening is a different proposition to a Wotton one. Teams handles the rest of it. Ask, and we will work out which is less trouble for you.

“Laura is a great teacher — warm, friendly, knowledgeable and encouraging. I really like the style of the lessons with a combination of conversation and worked exercises.”
— Jess  Read all my Google reviews →

What Florence wanted from these hills

Long before anyone here thought of Italy as somewhere to go on holiday, Italy was thinking about Gloucestershire. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the finest wool in Europe came off Cotswold sheep, and the people who wanted it most were Tuscan. Florence’s cloth guilds, the Arte della Lana and the Calimala, were built on wool bought abroad and finished at home. Francesco di Marco Datini, the merchant of Prato who died in 1410 and left his entire archive behind him, had English wool shipped to him by Italian merchant houses in London. Most of it came from the Cotswolds, which his clerks wrote into the ledgers as Chondisgualdo. The merchants who grew rich on that trade are still in the floors of the churches at Northleach and Cirencester, brasses with their woolmarks cut into them.

The language came back in person in the 1940s, in less happy circumstances. By 1943 there were some 75,000 Italian prisoners of war in Britain, and a few of them were here. At Chipping Campden a small working camp of wooden huts stood in Keyte’s Field at Catbrook, about four acres inside a wire fence, on land belonging to W. Keyte of The Sheppey. The men were driven out in parties to work the surrounding farms. They were here before the German prisoners arrived in 1944, and most went home soon after the war ended.

Common questions

There is an exam at the end of this for me — GCSE, A-level, IB. Do you take that on?

Yes, and it is a different job from conversation. I have QTS and a PGCE, I spent years in classrooms, and I taught Italian on the International Baccalaureate at Redmaids’ High School in Bristol, so I know what the IB wants from a student and how differently it marks from A-level. Exam Italian is a game with published rules: the speaking test rewards particular things, the writing rewards structures you can prepare in advance. We work on the language, and separately on the rules. Tell me the board and the paper and I will tell you honestly whether the time left is enough.

Is teaching a sixteen-year-old very different from teaching someone my age?

Very. I teach both — adults one to one and in the group course, and teenagers through GCSE, A-level and IB — and most of my classroom years were with teenagers, so I have done both properly. Teenagers copy sound better — they will take an accent off you without noticing they have done it. They also tend not to have chosen to be there. Adults choose, which is an enormous advantage, and then spend the first month embarrassed, which is an enormous disadvantage. With an adult I explain more grammar, because adults want the machinery. With teenagers I would explain less and drill more. Same language, different way in.

How will I know I am actually getting better, and not just enjoying myself?

I keep a record of what we have covered and I bring it back. Something taught in week three reappears in week nine, and either it comes out of you or it doesn’t, and that tells us both something. There are also markers you feel rather than measure: you stop translating in your head before you speak, you catch the second half of a sentence instead of only the first word, you start arguing with the subtitles. Every so often I will ask you to do something you could not have done at the start — describe your week, handle a phone call — and we find out where we are.

Nearby: Gloucester · Cheltenham · Stroud · Cirencester · Dursley