Meet Our Trainers

His favourite aspect of teaching is creating a safe space for his students to practise and improve in. In his opinion, the most important thing for becoming an ESL teacher is giving yourself the opportunity to try it out. Eanna never imagined being a teacher but soon realised that he loved teaching and found it both rewarding and challenging.

When she relocated to Brighton, Elena continued teaching English as a second language for some private homestays. However, soon she realised that she would like to pursue this as her future career and she got a job as a tutor of English in West Sussex County Council teaching migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. She completed DELTA and some additional training courses in Teaching English to Basic Literacy Learners and is specialised in this area. At present she is supervising and teaching refugees and asylum seekers as well as training teachers and ‘teachers-to-be’. Elena is very passionate about teacher training and strongly believes that our future is in blended learning (teaching using technology) so she loves experimenting and creating lessons of English using a range of gadgets and electronic devices.

Her career started in Spain in 1991, where her first teaching job was in a small primary school teaching English to children. With no knowledge of the business it was trial and error; however, she loved the job, after returning to England, became TEFL qualified. Over the years she has built up substantial experience teaching in all areas of TEFL and ESOL, including classroom-based teaching, 1:1, asylum seekers and working abroad in language and secondary schools, sharing expertise with colleagues in schools in the UK, Europe and the Caribbean. Liz is our busiest tutor, teaching 5 courses a month with us and is known for her great sense of humour.

Since then, she has worked at Temple University, the University of Colorado, and two non-profit organisations. In addition to teaching English as an Additional/Foreign Language, Ellen has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Linguistics. She has extensive experience training new and experienced teachers in basic literacy skills and adult education. Ellen has a Bachelor’s degree in Spanish Linguistics and a Master’s degree in Foundations of Bilingual/Multicultural Education, with a TESOL emphasis. Though she has administered, coordinated, and directed ESL programs at universities and non-profit organisations, her passion is teaching and training teachers. Ellen currently teaches ESL and Linguistics, tutors professionals who have been relocated to the Philadelphia area, and trains both volunteers and those who plan to teach abroad. Teaching has always been Ellen’s passion. She feels that she learns as much from her students as they learn from her.

After graduating, she taught in Tokyo for a year. It was a huge culture shock but she had a completely amazing year as she got to teach a wide range of levels, ages and abilities, with my oldest student being in her eighties. She returned to the UK with her sights set on staying for a month or two before moving on again, but that month turned into 7 years. She says she would love to travel again and teach in some other countries such as South America and China and would also love to go back to Hong Kong, where she was born. Her advice for future teachers would be to not take things too seriously. Things go wrong, planned activities don’t quite work, computers stop working, but if you approach things with a smile, things tend to work out in the end.

The world of TEFL appealed largely due to her low boredom threshold; She enjoys the peripatetic nature of the work, as well as meeting new people on a regular basis. She’s a lifelong horror movie fan and loves a good ghost story. Her advice for prospective EFL teachers is not to panic about the grammar but tackle it piecemeal; research what you’ll be teaching before each lesson, and over time it will all come together.

His career has included work in Ireland, France and Greece and, apart from TEFL teaching, he has worked in school management and quality assurance. Harvey likes to make the teacher training course fun and interactive and to give trainees as many opportunities as possible to practice and develop the skills that they will use in their future teaching practice.

She currently works at a language college in Manchester – as well as with The TEFL Academy – with students from around the world, from Italy to Thailand to Saudi Arabia. Helen is a self-confessed language nerd who loves teaching English and believes there are few jobs that are as interesting or as much fun. She also loves travelling and uses her EFL friends as an excuse to go abroad.

He started out by teaching English to children in Asia in 2001, and also became a speaking Examiner on Cambridge Young Learners as well as KEY/PET/FCE exams. Starting in 2003, he taught adult ESL in various countries and in different educational contexts, both public/private schools and universities mostly in Asia and Europe. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in ELT in 2012, Huss began teaching ELT methodology and linguistics courses to prospective teachers of English. In 2017, Huss completed his DELTA and ever since, he has been training teachers on various training courses in a number of countries. Currently, Huss is involved in both ESL instruction and teacher training in Montréal and Toronto, Canada. As a result of traveling and teaching English around the world, Huss has had a chance to become familiar with quite a few languages, among which he speaks French, Turkish, Armenian, and Persian fluently. It is easy to see how learning and teaching languages have become his twin passion in life.

He first worked for RMIT University, Melbourne, where he designed and delivered a range of specialist programs including English for Oil and Gas for Vietnamese engineers, and Aviation English for Chinese pilots. James became a CELTA tutor in 1998, and has taught hundreds of teacher training courses for prospective and current school teachers from Australia, China, Thailand and Vietnam. James is an IELTS examiner and has an MA in Applied Linguistics.