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.

Philip

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Philip was born in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, moved to France when he was 5 years old then to Switzerland when he was 11, where he studied in the French system. He has a Masters in History and another in Librarianship, both completed in England. Before coming to Brazil, he was a librarian in an international school in Switzerland for 8 years as well as working for UNESCO in Paris. He has experience teaching children and adults at all levels. He loves history, Japanese culture, literature and travelling.

Paula

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Paula is an American married to a Brazilian lawyer. She studied German Language and Literature at Harvard University and was selected for a year as exchange student in Germany, where she learned what it really meant to communicate in a foreign language. Later Paula studied Law at the University of Connecticut. After moving to Brasília, Paula has studied Practical Translating at the Casa Thomas Jefferson and Portuguese for Foreigners at the University of Brasília. She has taught English for over 10 years, and she loves teaching, shopping and watching TV.

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, soccer and frisbee.

Keri Lee van Zyl

Coming from the culturally diverse country of South Africa, Keri-Lee developed a love of languages at a young age. She speaks English as her mother tongue and Afrikaans, a daughter language of Dutch, as a secondary language. She has lived in England and the USA, and travelled to Brazil, Dubai, Nepal, Canada and the African countries of Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland. Keri-Lee has a BSc degree with Psychology, as well as a diploma in Reflexology. Being the proverbial bookworm, Keri-Lee has many interests, ranging from health, science, education and languages to cooking, technology, art and literature. Her happy place is being in nature with her family, or out on an adventure travelling somewhere new.