Norma's Teaching: Fun, Fast and Fantastic

You may not know her by her full name, but chances are that, if you’re reading this magazine, you have seen many of her Instagram videos and picked up some useful English tips from them. In fact, if you are an Italian with an interest in improving your English, you may very well be one of her hundreds of thousands of followers.

Dynamic

Norma Cerletti —known online simply as Norma of @normasteaching— is one of the biggest success stories of the new era of e-learning. Included in this year’s Forbes list of the Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs Under 30, this teacher from Milan began posting short videos on TikTok a little more than a year ago, during the Covid-19 lockdown. Norma’s aim is to help people learn English with dynamic and amusing mini-lessons, tips on pronunciation, vocabulary, idioms and fun quizzes.

Magnetic

Indeed, not only did her timing prove spot-on but her engagement with viewers nothing short of magnetic, as in just months her community grew exponentially. At the time of writing, @normasteaching had close to 700,000 followers on Instagram and some 300,000 on TikTok.

Accessible

Norma’s “fun, fast and fantastic” method is not exclusive to social media, however. All those interested in her lessons can also access longer video lessons through her website. Or for those interested in owning a traditional learning tool, Norma’s practical course book NomaL English, containing lots of different exercises and challenges, was published last June and quickly reached number 1 in language learning books on Amazon.

So what is the secret to Norma’s success? How did everything begin? Speak Up visited with Norma in her Milan studio to talk about her experience as a teacher and how it feels to be a social media phenomenon. Norma also promised to give us some tips on how to learn English in a “fun, fast and fantastic” way, and in a style that she believes to be fully compatible with the Speak Up method. She began by describing her own relationship with the English language as a student.

Norma Cerletti (American-Italian accent): I’ve always liked English as a second language. I was a really good student back in school, in high school especially. I used to study a lot. I was really into it, you know, but most of all, what I wanted to achieve the most was to be able to understand English songs, American songs like Avril Lavigne, or those famous ones. And, yeah, that was my big desire to be able to understand music because I loved singing.

THE AMERICAN WAY

At age seventeen, Norma moved to the United States where she attended her senior year of high school in Castle Rock, Washington State. She remembers that experience as being transformative, and not only in a linguistic sense…

Norma Cerletti: The experience was definitely life-changing and it was great. It was really fun. I didn’t have to study that much at school compared to Italy. School was much, much easier. Back in school, to be honest, I don’t think I ever watched TV series in English. I have to be honest, back then, ten years ago, it wasn’t that common. We didn’t have Netflix or whatever. So what I did is I tried to reproduce the sounds as I heard them. And I tried to speak in my mind basically.

TEACHER

Back in Italy, and with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Università degli Studi di Milano, Norma began working as an English teacher for children in a private school. That experience proved crucial to her approach to teaching; her first videos are, in fact, aimed at kids, with a lot of singing and dancing involved! Spontaneous, lively and expressive, Norma now uses the same approach to teach people of all ages.

Norma Cerletti: I started teaching many years ago, almost ten years ago. When I started, I was working as a teacher, teaching Italian to foreigners for a volunteering job. And that’s how I realized how much I liked teaching, how much I loved having an impact on people.

SOCIAL MEDIA

One of Norma’s most successful ideas is her five-minute-a-day course on Instagram to learn new words and idioms simply by investing a little time every day. It is Norma herself who creates all the slides and the videos, and who records them. And although such brief content does seem easy to create, she says, they do require time, skill and intuition.

Norma Cerletti: The pros are the fact that it’s fast, fun, and fantastic, but the problem with that kind of audience is that you have to keep them entertained. So you have to be very direct, fast, and fun! I mean, you have to catch their attention and it’s not always easy, especially on social media where you can just, you know, swipe.

TEACHING METHOD

We then asked Norma why her teaching method has proved so popular and effective.

Norma Cerletti: My teaching method is immediate. That’s what people need. I only teach one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny topic every day, so it only takes maximum five minutes a day. And I also try to teach something that you don’t normally find in books. I try to point out details or idioms which are not so common. We don’t normally study them at school, some of them we do, but they’re not so common. And people love that because that’s real, it’s real English. Some things, you could never figure out what they mean unless you knew the actual meaning of the idiom.

BUILDING A COMMUNITY

Through daily videos and posts, Norma has built a wonderful relationship with her followers. Attracting people of all ages, her community admires her communication skills and relies on her course to learn English in a country where being fluent in a second language has long been considered a chore, rather than a satisfying learning experience.

Norma Cerletti: The most rewarding experience as a teacher for me was when my students, they were three years old, they started understanding what I was saying and they started answering in English. So that’s a very special moment. On social media, everything is completely different. And I get lots of messages from my followers, lots of love from them, and that’s amazing. Sometimes, people message me telling me that they have, for example, passed an exam and they feel like they want to thank me for that because I’ve helped them through my Instagram course.

A PIECE OF ADVICE

Much more than simply providing an effective method for learning English, Norma’s aim is to relay her enthusiasm for the language and motivate her community to have a pleasant relationship with it. She truly believes that everybody can learn English, no matter his or her age or background, and encourages everyone to adopt a positive approach.

Norma Cerletti: First of all, relax and start with a positive mind. Don’t tell yourself, “Oh, I hope I can do it.” No. Just start by telling yourself that you can do it. In English, you say it’s not rocket science. It’s not too difficult. It’s not rocket science. So you can do it. It’s just a language. You have already learned a language, your first language, and I’m sure you can learn a second one. You know how to do it. You already know. You don’t know that you know, but you know.

SPEAK UP

Finally, we asked Norma to recall her experiences with Speak Up magazine through all the years that she was perfecting the language.

Norma Cerletti: I remember back in high school and in middle school, I’m not sure, this one time, my teacher gave me a copy for the summer and I brought it with me everywhere. I remember there was Lenny Kravitz on the cover and I used to try to read it. I couldn’t really understand everything, but it was nice. I honestly love this magazine. I used to read it when I was young, and I definitely recommend it to my students. I think it’s a great, great product honestly, and it’s also very fun.

www.normasteaching.com