After my experience as a comprehensive school teacher in East Sussex in the 1970s I decided to follow up on the IH preparatory course I’d completed in the summer holidays and escape to Andalucia and the relative calm of IH Cordoba. A B.Phil Ed. TEFL from Birmingham University quickly followed and for the next thirty years or so English language teaching has taken me to Denmark, Slovenia, Oman and Italy as well as the occasional summer at the ELC in Hove.
Soon after arriving in Italy I learned to drive and noticed that in the course of the lessons I rapidly went from A1 to B1 in the language in order to achieve the task and avoid life-threatening situations. An enthusiasm for Task Based Learning was further developed during several years of responsibility for English language training in a multinational in Milan where I started writing ELT materials. The latest of these: Heads Up – Spoken English for Business has strong elements of TBL, student centred learning and a recognition of Dogme ELT which I believe can offer a lot to company courses in the right doses.
I’ve also taught English in universities abroad and faced the daunting task of helping large classes improve their spoken English with assigned communicative methodology texts. Colleagues and I are currently working on how the new technologies can help us best approach these classes.
