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Dear Nenah Iza! I thank you sincerely for everything you have given us. These are not only solid foundations in French, which my daughter Denise will certainly put to good use and which will serve me too, above all for reading French literature in the original. You also gave us a part of yourself, a warmth that is yours alone: with you, all of us in the group became richer. The two of us will miss you both. The finest word I have for what I feel is: thank you.

Her courses are professionally of a high standard, and the teacher always manages to establish a genuine relationship between teacher and students; she has an exceptional capacity for empathy and for motivating students (using all sorts of “tricks”, humour …), a unique approach and the ability to convey grammar and grammatical structures without being dry. She is one hundred per cent prepared for her lessons (structured and flexible delivery of the syllabus). She has a detailed knowledge of each individual's abilities and expectations. In this way she adapts the lessons to the participants on the course. She is very willing to adapt the programmes to the students and to accommodate any individual request without this affecting the group. She conveys the material in a very engaging and witty way. In her lessons she uses audio and video aids to the greatest possible extent, which contributed most to the students' progress (the camera above all). The material was backed by excellent support – in quality and in quantity. The role plays were at a very high level and were later analysed with the help of video recordings – the use of very advanced and modern approaches to presenting the material, which changed constantly. I attended French courses with Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer (active courses together with six colleagues) for a good year and a half (around 550 hours in total) and I am grateful to her for the French I acquired, and equally for the pleasant and interesting hours we spent together.

With Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer I studied the French language, namely in module 10 and the refresher module. In the course of my education in French I attended classes with nine different teachers. I would like to stress that what stayed with me above all from the teaching with Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer was: the approach, the teaching methods, the systematic structure, the exceptional ability to connect with and animate the participants, an ear for what the students wanted, and her readiness to meet individual requests by preparing extra exercises for the areas we felt we wanted to work on more intensively. I would particularly like to single out the variety of resources and methods used, such as: simulating events in different situations and settings, enlivening the teaching with various games, competitive or purely for entertainment, the use of the camera, a microphone with a tape recorder, TV, VIDEO, an overhead projector with transparencies. Attending French courses with Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer helped me personally to order and structure my knowledge of French in such a way that I can call it to mind incomparably more easily when it is needed.

The teaching methods, i.e. the pedagogical approach of Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer was and is “above average” in the sense that it departs from the formal and rigid methodological frameworks that “lean” too heavily on theory and grammatical structures and are less true to life in the topics they cover. What is very positive here is that she used methods of active participation (camera, microphone, role play e.g. running a meeting, telephone conversations), which proved very useful. With these more contemporary didactic approaches and methods she managed, in my opinion, to animate the participants and break the monotony of the course! Such an approach demands of the teacher that they be creative, that they have enough knowledge, energy and experience, which in the case of Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer was evident, as was the ability to adapt and the willingness to take into account the students' wishes regarding which topics and pedagogical activities to cover. In running the courses she managed to establish a relationship that is “a partnership” and not merely formal, which contributed a great deal to the relaxed atmosphere and to positive relations between us (»oh yeah, we laughed an awful lot!«). And that means a participant can ask questions without “brakes”, i.e. demand explanations from the teacher without fear of coming across as a fool – and that is far from something you get everywhere.

The syllabus of Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer is distinguished by its systematic structure and by the clarity of the goals of each module and of the sequence of skills that help you reach those goals. In her lessons Prof. Zeilhofer uses a range of teaching methods with which she successfully encourages the motivation to learn and eases the otherwise dry business of memorising, which is an unavoidable part of learning any language. In Slovenian language schools I have not yet come across such a systematic programme and such a variety of teaching methods, so to everyone who wants to learn French I warmly recommend working with Prof. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer and her language school AVEC plus.

I met Prof. Nenah Iza when she began teaching French at our company. My job required daily contact with France, and at that time I did not know a word of French. On top of that I had mixed experiences of language courses with various teachers. Prof. Nenah Iza won me over straight away with her perfect command of French. Her exceptional readiness to pass her knowledge on to her students, her extraordinary ability to explain and her effort to make sure we students learn to speak and write French correctly seem to me invaluable. Because she also teaches online, she accommodates our schedules to a great extent , and she likewise accommodates our wishes and draws up the teaching plan together with us. For all of us who expect high-quality, first-rate teaching, Prof. Nena is the right choice!

I experienced her teaching style as exceptionally effective, organised and systematic, while at the same time she was flexible enough to adapt the style and the content to the different needs of the participants, or rather to adapt to the individual learning style of each person. The systematic approach to grammar suited me particularly well, since that way of thinking is close to me. It also mattered a great deal to me that she did not teach us only academic, sterile French, but knew how to dose contemporary French vocabulary appropriately, that is, she put enough emphasis on the distinction between the official, the written and the spoken variety of the language. She would also step out of the planned programme without difficulty and supplement it with additional content if the situation called for it. This way of learning is of course most often subject to the time constraints that come with work obligations. Professor Zeilhofer was exceptionally flexible in this: over all those (more than 12) years the French lessons took place on every day of the week, from early until late. At the end of our work together I can give only the best possible marks for the education I received, whether we speak of the manner, the methods, the adaptability or the effectiveness.

The teacher's knowledge and experience, her professional attitude to her work, her ability to identify the key weak points in an individual's knowledge and to approach removing them effectively, and in addition her practical knowledge of French social customs, since she spent part of her schooling in France – all of these are the key reasons why to this day, despite irregular study on my own and of frequent shortages of time in my knowledge of French I have made exceptional progress. In the francophone sphere (command of grammar and vocabulary, everyday and business communication, listening, reading, writing and other comprehension) I can operate independently, which for someone in this kind of professional and personal situation is exceptionally important and valuable. The teacher has an exceptional feel for the needs both of the whole group and of the individual, and in effectiveness her lessons go beyond the bounds of an ordinary school lesson in the teacher-student pairing; this also holds for her care in maintaining the student's knowledge through the right measure of homework. Shaping the timetable around what the student can manage and her readiness to work outside the usual lesson slots (in my case this means practically constant availability, the possibility of lessons on non-working days or at extremely early morning hours) is a further reason why it is hard to find the right measure of the value that working with Professor Zeilhofer brings.

I was extremely satisfied with the French course led by Mrs. Nenah Iza Zeilhofer. On the basis of many years of experience in teaching French she plans and adapts the teaching and the content of the course so that the result of the learning is as good as possible. The experience of running the course remotely over Skype is very positive. She prepares all the material in advance and after every lesson also sends through notes and additional information.