Sophie Lambert

I am from Lyon, have taught French for nine years, and live in Istanbul — which means I have learned a language as an adult recently enough to remember exactly how it feels to be unable to say what you mean.

My beginners' course reaches A2 in about thirty sessions and is built on speaking from the first week, with pronunciation taken seriously early: the French vowel system is unforgiving, and fixing it later is much harder than getting it right now. At B1 and B2 we move to podcasts, film, and the argumentative writing that DELF asks for.

For DELF candidates I run full timed mocks with the official marking grids, so nothing about the exam format is a surprise on the day.