Axelle

I have had the pleasure of taking lessons with Axelle throughout the past year, as she gave me extra support with my French language work during the final year of my Modern Languages degree at the University of Cambridge.

Axelle has supported me with a wide array of tasks throughout the year, and her ability to ascertain my evolving needs and cater to these has always been excellent and very greatly appreciated. I frequently joined our Zoom lessons quite overwhelmed by my workload and uncertain as to how best to use our time together to prepare for my exams, upon which Axelle calmly assessed what I needed to do, established the priorities, planned our class accordingly, and also advised me on how I could structure my independent study to maximise efficiency. I found her calm and strategic approach to be enormously reassuring and effective.

The tasks that Axelle helped me with included translating parts of my dissertation into French, and practicing discussing this ready for my oral examination. She also supported me with my preparation for my written exam on French national and cultural identity, helping me to understand and synthesise French academic articles, and to structure arguments for essays using the ideas we read about together. Finally, she helped me to prepare for my translation paper, which required me to translate extracts of stylistically diverse literary texts from a variety of historical periods between French and English. I feel that the variety of tasks that Axelle was able to help me with so effectively is very clearly demonstrative of her intellectual acuity and vast linguistic knowledge, alongside her adaptability as a tutor. Her wealth of experience in both academia and professional translation were absolutely evident throughout our tutoring, and her ability to draw upon this to help me with essay writing and translation methodology was invaluable to me.

Despite greatly lacking confidence in my French and struggling a lot with the demands of my course, I was able to graduate with a first-class degree, and I feel I would have been entirely unable to do this without Axelle’s academic support, unwavering positivity, and continuous encouragement! Consequently, I must say an enormous thank you to Axelle, and if you are looking for a French or Italian tutor, please don’t hesitate to try lessons with Axelle, I really don’t think anybody could possibly be disappointed!