Alena Sunavska – a polyglot in the business
Learning foreign languages requires a huge amount of time, dedication and resilience. More and more people in the UK do recognise the importance of speaking another language, especially in today’s multinational world. Alena Sunavska, the founder of London Language Studio, is one of them. As a professional linguist, she has dedicated her career to helping others to learn. For her, being able to teach a language is a gift, and a personal vocation.
Alena started her language career at the age of six, when she was selected to study at a prestigous specialist language primary school in Prague, studying Russian and German. At that time she was already fluent in Czech, Slovak and Russian. She started to learn English and Italian at the age of fourteen (English being a school subject, Italian from her own initiative, by herself).
At eighteen she was fluent in both, and at this point she commenced her working career in languages, acting as a multilingual tour guide, freelance interpreter and translator, as well as a language tutor alongside her studies.
Being fluent in Italian at an early age allowed her to pursue her university studies at the University Ca Foscari of Venice, well renowned for their language faculty. She enrolled on a course in History and Modern Languages, reading Spanish and Modern Greek, delivering her final thesis in Spanish.
After living in Italy for six years, she moved to the UK and during her two postgraduate courses in London she focused on the theory of languages; a course in Translation first and later in Language Education. Alongside that she also spent some time brushing up on her German and French as well as getting some basics in Hindi.
Over the many years of learning and teaching languages Alena explored different learning environments; from formal university study, classroom study to self-study methods, through “learn as you go” experience with limited material on hand to intuitive learning or immersion techniques. Through her personal experience as a learner as well as her work experience as a tutor, she has developed a variety of effective teaching methods which all focus on achieving fluency in a language.
Currently Alena teaches six languages, speaks ten and understands about twelve. She had been tutoring adults, children, classrooms, groups and individuals for over ten years before she decided to set up her language tuition business in London.
She founded London Language Studio in 2005 and started the continuous and thorough selection process to recruit talented tutors who would work alongside her, and expand on Alena’s experience and teaching principles as well as maintaining professionalism and the highest standards in delivering top quality tuition. Above their comitment to deliver effective language tuition, the London Language Studio team are passionate about helping students to understand how to learn by themselves. They help their students master some essential self-study techniques, allowing them to become independent learners as their language course progresses.
Apart from teaching and running the business, Alena also publishes specialist articles about language learning and effective self-teaching methods. Recently she has launched the Little Linguist project, promoting early language education in children. She works with parents of babies, newborns and as early as with prenatal mothers, and mentors parents in bilingual families, helping them to bring up their children bilingually.