About me

I have been an EFL teacher now for many years, working in Hong Kong, Brunei, Nepal, the Middle East and now in Macau.  I have been lucky enough to work with many different groups and, more importantly, learn from them.  For me, I have to admit that working with Gurkha soldiers and recruits in both Hong Kong and, for a short period, Nepal was the most rewarding.

In the Middle East, I worked in Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, but also conducted workshops all around the Emirates as a member of the TESOL Arabia Learner Independence SIG, of which I am still the webmaster.  Once again, I was lucky enough to meet others, both students and colleagues who could help me learn different things.  A small group at my last institution tried very hard to incorporate both content and technology into the language classes, especially with the lower ability students, as a way of helping them improve and become involved in the writing process. Using Audacity we taught the students the importance of editting before we started to work with more formal writing tasks, and were lucky in this aspect transferring easily as they had enjoyed themselves and felt the this was a normal part of the process.

In my current position, here in Macau, I am currently teaching three levels from lower intermediate to pre-advanced.  With the lower classes, I am primarily teaching general English, although with one group - all Law students - I am trying to intergrate more legal terminology.  The more advanced groups are working more on developing research skills, but we are using these groups to produce our podcasts.

I am also working with others in trying to develop an online ILC as we do not have the space for a proper ILC on campus.  I also serve as the Supervisor of our ETS Testing labs which are in great demand at the weekends for tests such as the iBT TOEFL.