Book a free 1:1 to strategize your teaching business goals.  Escaping precarity in ELT? Join our free support group here.   Education is designed around focusing on the learner first and the teacher as a medium to support the learner. Sarah Mercer tells us why this leads to unhealthy teachers.  Sarah Mercer is a Professor of foreign language teaching at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning...

Book a free 1:1 to strategize your teaching business goals.  Escaping precarity in ELT? Join our free support group here.   ELT is full of disasters, including the destruction of the communicative approach. Dr. Enrica Piccardo tells us why.  Dr. Piccardo is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research spans language teaching approaches/curricula, multi/plurilingualism, creativity and complexity...

Book a free 1:1 to strategize your teaching business goals.  Escaping precarity in ELT? Join our free support group here.   What do toad venom, the 5 stages of grief, and precarity all have in common? Andrew, Leo, and Mike explain.  Sustainability in the ELT industry as a teacher is pretty simple: 1. It is precarious 2. We all need to earn more money 3. It's unlikely to do that by having just one job. In this episode, we discuss strategies to earn more by creating your own offer....

Escaping precarity in ELT? Join our free support group here.   Want to move faster? Book a free 1:1 to strategize your teaching business.  ELT provides the wrong input: language as it should be spoken not as it is spoken. This is wrong and Sheila Thorn gives us another way.  Sheila Thorn is a teacher, teacher trainer and materials writer whose niche focuses on teaching listening. She founded The Listening Business in 1998 and is the author of countless seminal books that have moved our...

Join our free support group for teachers building their business.  Grammar instruction or grammar learning? We dive into this with today's guests.  Tania Ionin is a Professor of Linguistics and Director of Graduate Studies in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of expertise include second language acquisition and experimental semantics, with a focus on the nominal domain. Silvina Montrul is Marjorie Roberts Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences,...

Join our free support group for teachers building their business.  So many teachers focus on teaching when they should focus on something else. In this episode, we dive into this with the great Bill VanPatten.  Bill VanPatten is an award-winning scholar and teacher with an international reputation in the fields of second language acquisition and second language teaching. He is a requested speaker at conferences and meetings and over the course of his career he has given over 500 keynote...

Join our free support group for teachers building their business.  So many teachers feel they can't teach pronunciation if their speech doesn't sound a certain way. Listen to this episode to discover why that isn't true.  Robin Walker and Gemma Archer are pronunciation specialists who co-authored "Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World," which aims to encourage pronunciation instruction from a lingua franca and intelligibility perspective.  We chat with Robin & Gemma...

Find your niche & get 5 new clients. Start here.  Many teachers are wary of using a task-based approach. Learn how to overcome that and start using it in your business or classrooms.  Lara Bryfonski is an applied linguist and assistant professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on task-based language teaching and she is the Project Director of STARTALK-TASK, an NSA-funded task-based training program for critical language teachers. She recently co-authored the...

Our 5in30 community helps you get 5 new clients in 30 days. Start here.  Donna M. Brinton is a methodologist, trainer, author, and distinguished figure in applied linguistics. A key aspect of Donna's work is her advocacy for Content-Based Instruction (CBI). Over her five decades in the field, she has authored and co-authored many books, including the famed "Apple Book." In this conversation, Donna expounds on: her beginnings as a teacher & her struggles with methodology why she decided to...

Our 5in30 helps you get 5 new clients in 30 days. Start here.  Leo, Mike, and Andrew grab some nog, get in the holiday spirit, and chat about authenticity - Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2023. We delve into what the word means to us and how we and anyone building a business can bring as much authenticity as possible into 2024.  Specifically, we dive into: LYE's beginnings our process and struggles with niching down why the response "teachers will love that" to our first offer was a...

We help teachers start their own online business for free. Click here to join in. Cecilia Nobre is a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics at Warwick, has been an EFL teacher for over 20 years, and is a trainer on DipTESOL, CertTESOL, and Celta trainer. She has co-authored the book "Using Video to Support Teacher Reflection and Development in ELT" with Steve Mann and Laura Baecher. Her research interests lie in the areas of teacher development, video reflection, and reflective practice. In...

We help teachers start their own business for free. Click here to join in. Geoff Jordan is a teacher, trainer, academic, and author. Geoff has a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition, has worked at ESADE, Barcelona for 28 years, and recently co-authored a book with the late Mike Long called "ELT Now and How It Could Be."His main academic interests are: theories of SLA, psycholinguistics, teaching practice and computational linguistics. Specifically, Geoff touches on: his beginnings in the ELT...

See our free CPD and business growth guides for teachers. Click here.  Paul Nation is an Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Victoria and a renowned author and scholar in our industry. He joins us for a discussion on learning, putting research into practice, and - of course - the four strands 27 years later.  Paul touches specifically on: his vocabulary niche the birth of the four strands how it's a basis for course construction, not lesson design how he learned...

Want to get your first 5 clients in the next 30 days? Click here.  Deep in the Dogme Days of Summer, Mike, Leo, and Andrew get into part 2 of their  series.  Here, we delve into: using Dogme in the scope of outcome-based instruction challenges implementing reactive teaching in different contexts obstacles in moving from a structured approach to teaching to one of transference using the "so you can" framework to get to the heart of your client's desired transformation handling student...

Click here to join our free teacherpreneur support community to grow together.  Andrew, Mike, and Leo sit down and ponder Dogme....as a new approach? It certainly has experienced a resurgence since the pandemic and we are curious why that is.  We also dive into: the role of the teacher the shift away from planning & towards reacting what authentic communication actually means how teachers can model lifelong learning habits using Dogme in your business and using the less is more...

Click here to join our free teacherpreneur support community to grow together.  Dylan was born just outside London and has been working in the ELT sector for nearly 25 years. About 12 years ago, he discovered Dogme, or as he prefers to call it “Teaching Unplugged”, and this led to his interest in deep-end learning approaches like TBLT and language coaching. When he trains teachers, he makes sure they learn how to move away from the coursebook and deal with emergent language. In this episode,...

Click here to grow with other teacherpreneurs in our free support community.  And click here to check out The Chilled Investor to make your money work for you.  Nicola has been in ELT for over 20 years as a teacher, materials writer, and entrepreneur. She's written many coursebooks and over 200 pages of the British Council learning English website. More recently, she helps language teachers take control of their finances.  Her interest in investing came about almost by accident when she began...

Click here to grow with other teacherpreneurs in our free support community.  Ken has been in ELT since 1995. A teacher, trainer, and author, he has written or co-written over 20 books, including the recently published Connections 3 coursebooks with Pearson. In this episode, he dives into the lexical approach, why it never caught on and how teachers can use it in their teaching. Specifically, we dive into:  how ELT has evolved  why Michael Lewis was "pissed" Dogme ELT & its place how...

Click here to grow with other teacherpreneurs in our free support community.  Leo, Mike and Andrew return to the studio to discuss the most common challenges teacherpreneurs face. They get into the three hats that a teacherpreneur needs and how to build up each one. Specifically, they talk about: balancing the teacher, creator, and entrepreneur in you  teaching being the only profession where we feel guilty about earning more money why a lack of goal clarity means you won't move...

Click here to grow with other teacherpreneurs in our free support community.  Leo, Mike, and Andrew hop in the studio to record their annual year-end audit. Here, they reflect on the lessons they learned in 2022. They run through specific lessons that drive success, failure, and resilience. Specific lessons they touch on are: 1. It always takes longer than we think it's going to take 2. Behind mountains are more mountains 3. Knowing what success looks like 4. Starting small 5. Getting over...

Grow with other teacherpreneurs in our free support community.  Danny Norrington Davies and Richard Chinn have done extensive research on emergent language and have co-authored "Working with emergent language." Danny has over 25 years in the industry and is currently a CELTA and DELTA tutor. His first book "Teaching Grammar: From Rules to Reasons" was a best-seller. Richard has trained teachers all over the world and currently does pre-service and in-service training courses at IH London. He...

Join our free teacherpreneur community.  Katarina Mentzelopoulos is an ESRC-funded Ph.D. student at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her research interests include language learning motivation, exceptional language learning, multilingualism and learner identity. She recently co-authored two books with the late Zoltán Dörnyei: Stories from Exceptional Language Learners Who Have Achieved Nativelike Proficiency (50% discount code STORIES50 until 30/11) Lessons from Exceptional Language...

Going solo as a teacher? Start here.  Chris Jacobs joins Mike and Andrew to talk about flow theory. Chris is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, teaching French, Italian, Spanish, and Linguistics. He is currently working on projects exploring learning optimization through flow - flow is a state of deep focus on an enjoyable activity that is at once challenging and accessible. Research on flow and language acquisition is increasing, and Chris is at the forefront of...

Want to use modern approaches to grow your own teaching business? Book a chat with us to see if we can help.  Leo, Mike, and Andrew talk about burnout in education, Learn YOUR English beginnings, their journey, and how teachers can overcome obstacles. Drawing parallels from stories presented in Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath - the beginning of French impressionism, why going to Harvard isn't necessarily an advantage, Ikea's controversial founding and more - they tackle how successful...