Dafne Ostermuenchner

I am a trilingual speaker of Spanish, English, and French. I'm also teaching myself Portuguese and have achieved basic conversational fluency. I was born and raised in Venezuela, thus Spanish is my native language. I learned French by being educated in fully French schooling from the age of 7, and English from private tutoring as well as from the immersion I gained moving to the US at 14 years old. I have been in university-level coursework taught in each of these languages and graduated with my Bachelor's in International Relations earlier this year.

My goal as an educator is to utilize the root language of the learner as a base to establish comprehension of whichever language they choose to learn. The most important aspect of language learning is immersion and as many learners don't reside in areas where they can speak to native speakers of the language they are learning, my goal is to create an artificial immersion, through videos and exercises outside of the classroom that aims for learning that extends beyond our 1:1 setting.

For these languages, there are various dialects so I would aim to do a well-versed approach that helps students understand Spanish from Chile as much as Spanish from Spain or French from Canada as much as French from France. While there are countless expressions each accent has that I won't be able to go over, I would hope my students would be able to travel anywhere and communicate with anyone.