Ruth Pringle | Blue Noun Language Hub — Perthshire Businesswomen's Network

I’m an ESL (English as a Second Language) coach for international adults. I have a background as a contemporary artist, and training in art history, so I teach English differently from commercial schools and because of this, tend to attract non-corporate clients.

My online courses are specialist: Internationals who need specialist English language skills for creative careers. (That’s language skills for artist talks, presenting design work/projects, collaborations, creative job interviews etc.)

I also offer week-long immersion English-speaking experiences to a much broader language-learning community. This service is not English language for artists but for all professionals with a meet and greet element to their work, and an interest in culture. Although these holidays are based at our ‘hub’ in Crieff - they offer a ‘no classroom’ culture-led exploration of Scotland.

Instead of practising language for presentations in a classroom, we visit artists, designers, craftspeople, artisans and makers in studios and workshops. Our conversations are real, professional-to-professional (not fake roleplay).

My holidays are a true immersion experience because learning a language WITH the culture (the cheese, the social history, the music, the people, the landscape) gives you a deep and lasting connection, confidence and language association. It’s not a miracle cure, you still need to work to learn, but falling in love with who you are in English is the key to a lifetime of investing that effort.

Forget looking out a tour bus window, it’s time to get your welly boots on. Our immersion tours explore how the Perthshire landscape shapes produce, artworks, and lifestyles. (Of particular interest are any combination of traditional craft and culture and history, with modern technology/processes and international markets).

I feel this focus gives a very honest and complimentary experience of Perthshire - in the limited time we have (just a week or two). We don’t tell people what Scotland is. We curate a menu of experiences which lets our clients discover their own version of this, for themselves.

I would love to enlarge my network of artists and makers we visit on our tours.