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How to run a discussion with adult learners that doesn’t collapse into small talk
I rarely end up in small talk. I usually start there. The distinction matters. Small talk is not the problem; it is the entry point. The collapse happens not when the conversation starts with something light, but when it stays there. And it stays there because the teacher is not listening for the thread. There…
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Your students don’t need you to correct them. They need someone to argue back.
I started the way they teach you to start. I was cautious, as college had made me, and I stayed cautious for longer than I probably should have. Course books, structured progression, controlled practice. Nearly 25 years later, I still think that foundation was right. What I questioned, gradually and without any particular epiphany, was…
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The long road to ‘native-ish’: anatomy of a twenty-year graft
This is where it comes from. Not the certificates. The graft. The handouts are the way they are because of how I learned. They are not born from a theory book; they are reverse-engineered from twenty years of struggle, failure, and eventual fluency. The raw data I am knocking on the door of 50. I…
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A look under the bonnet: the anatomy of a handout
The ESLTutorHub handouts do not follow the warm-up, presentation, practice, production structure most teachers were trained on. This is deliberate. The materials look, at first glance, like a linguistic obstacle course. They are. My view is that students do not need to be led by the hand through a lesson. They need to be thrown…
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Why the ‘I’ in AI still needs a teacher
There is a version of this story where I tell you that I opened a language model, typed a brief, and the handouts appeared fully formed, ready for Monday’s lesson. That version is fiction. What actually happens is considerably more interesting, and considerably more labour-intensive. I use AI to create the ESLTutorHub materials. The process…