About

I’m Jonathan McBride and I’m a passionate languages teacher and educator based in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. I’m interested in rethinking modern languages education in the UK and specifically, how we can encourage more of our young people to discover the joy of learning another language.

I’m originally from Northern Ireland, but since I left aged 18 to complete an MA (Hons) in German and French at the University of Glasgow. I spent three years living in the city of Mainz in Germany, first as an English assistant at a school and then teaching English to undergraduate students at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

My other big passion in life is music and have played the violin since the age of seven. I spent two years completing my Masters in violin performance at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and subsequently played with various professional symphony orchestras such as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata, Camerata Ireland and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. During this time I also taught violin and musicianship at Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise Raploch programme, a really amazing social programme that aims to tranform young peoples’ lives through an intensive music education.

At a certain point I wanted to devote more time to languages teaching and to get back into the classroom… So I completed my PGDE at Edinburgh University and became a teacher of French German, and I currently teach at The Edinburgh Academy. I enjoy engaging with research on second language acquisition and education more generally, and I’m particularly interested in the point where research and teaching practice converge.