I was brought up in the South West of England, never very far from the sea and close to the beautiful and historic city of Bath. I went to university in nearby Bristol, where I studied French and German. One of the attractions of the degree programme was the chance to spend a year abroad. My months in Toulouse and then Munich were a brilliant experience that did a lot to help me understand the difference between doing grammar exercises in books and really speaking the language by having conversations with native speakers and others on topics from the newspapers and TV or based on films we had seen and music we were listening to.

Immediately after my degree, I went to teach English at university in France while researching a suitable topic for a Ph.D. I enjoyed it immensely, rather to my surprise. When back in the UK a couple of years later, I decided to become a qualified TEFL teacher and see if I could make a job of that.

In what seems like no time at all, I had started my own British Council accredited language school with my partner and was involved in teacher training courses, marketing, management, examining, writing exams and creating materials to promote effective learning.

In 2007, I moved to Manchester to get married, and started a new but related career as a lecturer in English as a foreign language.

I have written a number of books for teachers and for students, including Dictionaries in the Resource Books for Teachers series by OUP, Elementary Grammar for Harper Collins Cobuild as co-author with Dave Willis, and Idioms Organiser for LTP, now Heinle. Recently I have written coursebooks and resourcebooks for the German schools and adult learner markets.

I also work as a freelance consultant and teacher trainer. I am lucky enough to have run workshops all over the world, including Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Peru, Russia, Spain and Slovenia.

I’ve known Jeremy, my co-author, for over 25 years as we both lived in worked in Bristol. Since then we have worked together on many projects and teacher training courses for primary, secondary and university teachers. Recently we have done a lot of CLIL workshops to help teachers teach content lessons via English.