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Zahra Meru

I was born and bred in Nottingham, England, the home of the infamous Robin Hood.  Having spent my whole childhood and school life there, I then moved to the north to study at the University of Durham.  I am a linguist and studied Russian and Croatian for three years at university, as well as a practice year which I spent in Krasnoyarsk and Ulyanovsk studying Russian and teaching English.  After finishing my degree, I did a TEFL course at Language Link in Moscow, before moving to St. Petersburg.  The plan was to teach English for a year, then move back to Britain and work as a translator in London.  Towards the end of my first year in St Petersburg however, my students begged me to stay and so I decided to stay a little longer.  I ended up working there for seven years, five years as the Director of Studies. While I was in St Petersburg, I realised translating wasn’t for me so I studied for the Trinity TESOL Diploma which I managed to complete despite obstacles such as the British Council library closing, being run over by a mini-van, and being on a bus that caught fire on the way to Finland, to name but a few.  I later also trained to be an Oral Examiner for a large number of Cambridge exams.  During my seven years in the cultural capital, I taught all the different levels from beginner to proficiency, children from the age of three to adults, exam preparation courses for IELTS, FCE, CAE, CPE, TOEFL, BEC and ILEC, and ran a number of teacher training courses and seminars on various topics as well as preparation for various TKT exams.  As I could not get any more different experiences with different courses in St. Petersburg, a change of scene was in order so I moved to Moscow to be the Head of Training and Support for Language Link partner schools and Moscow regional schools. I can be quite a creative person at times, and I really enjoy making games and activities for my students to do in class or for homework.  I try to make them personalised so that the students can relate to them.  Sometimes I even make texts or tasks for them to do with information about me.  Such an approach, I find, can be really motivating for students as they see the effort their teacher has made into creating an interesting lesson, and they therefore try hard to complete the task well.  Of course it takes much longer than simply following a general course book or copying interesting tasks from other resources, which I also do sometimes, but the effort really pays off when I see the enjoyment that students get from doing the tasks I created for them.  One of my current teaching related passions is teacher training.  I love seeing the progress teachers make in my training courses and no question is ever stupid in my book, so feel free to ask me for any help or advice – I’ll be more than happy to help you out.