One tutor knows you
We do not rotate tutors at random. The person who runs your week-twelve mock exam is the person who heard you stumble in week one. Continuity drives every choice we make.
Our story
Six years of lessons that move the needle.
Iceforma started in a Sunway co-working office in 2019 with one British tutor, six Malaysian learners and a stubborn belief that great spoken English is taught — not gamified.
The founding bet
We picked teachers over technology.
Our founder, Erin McGuire, came to Kuala Lumpur in 2017 to teach business English at a multinational bank. She found a market drowning in flashcard apps and English-as-a-second-language teachers — but starved of native speakers willing to sit, listen, and rebuild the speaking habit lesson by lesson.
Iceforma was the answer. A small academy where every tutor on the bench is born-and-raised in an English-speaking country, holds a teaching credential, and is paid well enough to stay for years instead of months.
Six years on we run a roster of fourteen tutors, three Malaysian learner-success advisors and one studio in Bandar Sunway where we record our diagnostic-week assessments. The original bet still holds.
What guides us
Three principles. We say no to anything that violates them.
No theatre, no shame
You will be corrected — gently, specifically, and with the recording rolling so you can replay the moment. The bar is honest progress, not preserving feelings.
Reports, not vibes
Every fourth week your tutor writes a one-pager: where you are on the CEFR ladder, what improved, what is still drifting, and what the next four weeks will fix.
Our founder
Erin McGuire — fifteen years teaching English overseas.
Erin grew up outside Belfast and holds the Cambridge DELTA. Before Iceforma she taught at Berlitz Singapore and a Big Four bank in KL, and is the academy’s lead curriculum writer.
She still teaches the Tuesday-evening adult conversation group herself. “If I cannot fix it in the room,” she likes to say, “I have no business deciding what we put in the syllabus.”
- Founder & Head of Tutors, Iceforma Academy
- Cambridge DELTA (with distinction in Module 3)
- Former lead trainer, Maybank Group Foundation English Programme
- Contributing author, Business English Casebook (Oxford, 2022)
By the numbers
What six years of focused teaching looks like.
14
Tutors on the academy bench
9,400
Learner-hours delivered since launch
2,180
Certificates of completion issued
4.9
Average tutor rating from learner reviews
Curious whether we are a fit?
The simplest way to find out is a sixty-minute trial with one of our tutors. We will pick the right person for what you want to fix.