I have broad experience in what is perhaps a narrow field, having worked in the private EFL sector all my working life, as teacher, director of studies, school director and teacher trainer, now in Spain (where I live), but previously in Egypt and with short stints in the UK and my native NZ. All this time I have been working alongside practising teachers, and have never been far from the classroom, although more often as spectator than as protagonist. Teacher education has always been my special interest and was the subject of my MA dissertation at the University of Reading. I have had a lot of involvement in UCLES accredited teacher training schemes and I am at present Chief Examiner for the DELTA scheme. Over the last ten years I have managed to fit in some writing (participation in at least four course book projects) plus three books on language teaching, including Uncovering Grammar, dozens of articles and reviews, and a great deal of conferencing. Through organisations such as IATEFL, TESOL, EA (ex-ELICOS), TESOL NZ, APAC (Catalonia), FAAPI (Argentina), LAURELS, APPI (Portugal) plus the global network of IH schools, I have talked to and personally met hundreds of teachers all over the world. More recently I have been involved in on-line learning, having overseen the writing of a five level internet-delivered course in general English. My particular interests include: discourse analysis, classroom interaction, second language emergence and critical pedagogy – and the relationship between all four. To give you a flavour of where I am coming from, here is a quote from a book I am reading at the moment (Individual Freedom In Language Teaching by Christopher Brumfit, O.U.P. 2001):

… recognition of language as necessarily in flux, reflecting the movement and life of the minds that use it, enables us to see language activity in the education system as a process of working, not just a product of learning. Developments in second language acquisition research make it difficult to see the learning even of foreign languages as distinct from the process of language use: learning is using and using is learning. (…) Of course, there are also formal activities associated with the learning – people learn vocabulary lists off by heart more than is commonly acknowledged – but these activities are preliminary to the language learning process itself, for only when the language items are fused into active meaning systems by the process of use, is the language system developing for the learner’s own purposes. We may learn the tokens of language formally, but we learn the system by using it through reading or writing, or conversing.