MY APPROACH

What's the best way to learn a language?  By speaking it.  That's why I get my clients speaking in sentences from day one, even if it's your very first lesson.

The second best way is by listening.  I incorporate videos and film clips into our lessons so that you have plenty of opportunity to get used to the sound of people speaking the language. 

The worst way to learn a language is to learn lists of vocabulary.  This is the way my generation was often taught at school, and explains why people who learnt French for six years still can't order a cup of coffee.

You do need to know vocabulary, but there are better ways to make it stick in your head than by learning lists, and crucially you need to use it in context to really remember it.

My lessons are a mixture of sentence construction, grammar (but only backed up by speaking it in sentences - grammar on its own makes no sense to most children), videos, and (for older children and adults) newspaper articles and discussions of current affairs.  I don't normally give homework other than reviewing what we've done in the lesson.