"Hi, I'm Veronica — welcome to my studio."
Meet Veronica
¡Hola! I'm Veronica MacLarnon, and Spanish isn't just what I teach — it's who I am.
I'm a native Spanish speaker from Guatemala, a qualified teacher, and a language specialist with over 20 years' experience. I've spent my career doing one thing: helping people fall in love with Spanish the way I have — the language, the culture, and the people who speak it.
Why Spanish, why me?
I trained as a primary teacher in my own country, Guatemala, and taught there for 15 years before life brought me somewhere I never expected. I came to Oxford to study English as a second language, and it was there that I met my husband — we fell in love, and married a year later, in 1995.
Once I'd settled in the UK, I kept training: gaining new qualifications and building experience across all kinds of educational settings, from preschool children to adult education. I went on to specialise in teaching Spanish to foreigners through the University of Salamanca — the world's home of Spanish-language teaching, which sits alongside my original teaching qualification from Guatemala.
Through all of it, one thing never changed: my love for my mother tongue, and the joy of sharing it — the language, the culture, all of it ,with people who want to learn.
I teach Spanish as it's actually spoken — across Spain and throughout Latin America — because Spanish was never just one thing to me, and it shouldn't be to my students either.
My Approach
Every student who works with me gets a lesson built around them — not a fixed syllabus recited the same way to everyone. Whether you're a GCSE student chasing a grade, an adult picking up Spanish for the first time (or picking it back up after years away), or a confident speaker who just wants to keep the language alive, the starting point is always the same: where are you now, and what do you actually want from this?
That's true whether we're working through exam technique for AQA, Edexcel or OCR, building your confidence from complete scratch, or simply talking — properly talking — in a small conversation group.
Where we meet
I teach from my own studio in Prestwood, near Great Missenden — a relaxed, dedicated space, not a classroom that feels like school. One-to-one students can join me there face-to-face, or connect from anywhere in the country over Microsoft Teams. Conversation groups are always face-to-face at the studio, in small groups of just four, with students travelling in from across Great Missenden, Prestwood, Amersham, Chesham, Beaconsfield, Tring and the wider Chilterns.