NATURAL ENGLISH

Dorothy

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Dorothy Damasceno was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the USA. She lived most of her life in New Jersey and has a broad experience in the administration of small and large businesses. Her studies included a concentration in Commercial English at the Oxford TESOL/TESL Seminar. Dorothy has tutored high school and college students, and has taught in Intercultural Studies programs. She has been an English teacher at Natural Language for many years. Her leisure activities include taking walks and reading.

Ricky

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Ricky was born in Washington DC and studied Visual Communication at the Parsons School of Design in New York, with a masters in Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven. He worked as a plastic artist for 5 years and for another twelve years he wrote and acted in monologues on stages in Europe and Brazil. He has worked in Amsterdam in spacial research and is interested in everything that involves innovation. He is also interested in museums and cultural heritage. Currently he is decoding the extinct language of the indigenous Kariris.

Ellen

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Ellen was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and studied Spanish and English as a Second Language (ESL), including a semester in Spain. She also completed Latin American Studies and Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. During high school she lived for a year in Chile where she developed a passion for Latin American culture. Ellen loves to travel, discover new places and new people, thus learning more about the world. She believes in a very strong connection between language and culture and she incorporates this understanding in her teaching methods. She always wanted to teach English in a foreign country and is very happy to be doing what she loves.

Victor

When he was five years old Victor Hart lived with his American parents in Africa – he was trilingual and wondered about the differences among the various languages that surrounded him. He grew up mainly in the United States where he majored in Political Sciences at the prestigious Williams College in Massachusetts in 2000. He then returned to Brazil to take care of the family farm, and soon decided to create a language institute. In January of 2003 he hired a second teacher for Natural English (he was the first) and dedicated the next five years to developing the institute and its methodology, including a book for beginners, with original games. Currently Victor is an analyst in the international sector of the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), Brazil’s equivalent of the General Accounting Office (GAO). He continues to manage the farm on weekends, teaches children in the Natural Kids department of the language institute where he is available for consultations with management, and he studies Law at the University of Brasília (UnB) and Python programming on his own. Victor is a native speaker of English and Portuguese, almost-native in Spanish, and fluent in French. He dreams of adding technology to the proven success of Natural’s method in order to assist thousands of students worldwide to acquire and master foreign languages.

Nahum

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Nahum is British, born in Newcastle, England. He is very interested in languages, has studied Portuguese and Spanish at the University of Manchester and is a certified Cambridge CELTA English teacher. His experience includes teaching in Guatemala and also in Brazil where he was an exchange student in 2016. In addition to languages, Nahum’s great passions are Brazilian culture, and sports – badminton, football, and frisbee.

Judith Silberbauer

Judith is South African, from a small village near Cape Town. She has a Postgraduate Certificate in Education and a Degree in Art and Psychology from The University of Cape Town, and Rhodes University. She has 9 years teaching experience in both Central America and South Africa, and is passionately interested in language and education. In her free time she paints, plays with her dogs and kids and wanders in the mountains around her home. Her other great interests are psychology and literature.

Will Pattenden

Will is British, born in Bury St. Edmunds. He has always had an interest in Latin languages and cultures, leading him to travel a great deal in Latin America, discovering a particular affinity for Brazil. He studied Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Brighton. Upon his first arrival in Brazil, he became enamoured with many aspects of the culture that this fine country has to offer, particularly the unique and recognisable expression through the arts that so well defines the heart of the Brazilian identity. Not to mention the food! He spent many years involved in BMX, but is now more interested in yoga. He reads a lot and has a diverse range of interests regarding the nature of the human experience in general.

Leola McGarrell

I was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados, a small Island in the Caribbean. I've been living in Brasília for almost 6 years and teaching English for more than four. I love being able to see students grow in their experience with a language. I believe it's my job to provide students with the tools to help them reach their language goals. Teaching is special to me because I come from a family of teachers and I feel it's an honor to be able to spark a love of language in my students.