TEFL DISCUSSIONS Team

Adrian

Adrian Wallwork

chief editor, author

Adrian is from Manchester (UK) but has spent most of his adult life in Italy. He has taught general and business English, along with academic English to international PhD students. He is the author of three discussion books for Cambridge University Press, four business English courses for Oxford University Press, along with six books for the BBC, Scholastic and BEP. He is the editor and author of the English for Academic Research series for Springer Nature (with around 2.7 million legal downloads). His main interests are etymology and music (ECM jazz, early Can, John Martyn, King Crimson, Abul Mogard).

Anna

Anna Southern

editor

Anna has a BA Hons degree in French and Sociology, and postgraduate certificates in Development Studies, Public Health, and TEFL. She has worked as: Project Manager for both the British Council and the United Nations, both in the UK and overseas; ii) a freelance researcher for Carlton Television and the charity Crisis; iii) a researcher and Project Manager for the British National Health Service. Her publication record includes four ESL (Japan) books co-authored for the BBC, a photocopiable resource book co-authored for Scholastic, ten programme support guides for Carlton Television, two public reports for the charity Crisis, a community work guide for the National Health Service, a scientific paper for the International Journal of TB and Lung Disease, and a self-published novel entitled Not At Home. She lives in Pisa with her husband Adrian Wallwork, along with their son and black labrador.

BOOKS: AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Shradha Ghosh

Shradha was born in Chhattisgarh (India) in 1996 and speaks fluent English, Hindi, and Italian. She has a Master’s in Space Engineering. As part of her Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies in India, she also studied scientific and business English. She started teaching English at the age of 17 for an NGO called Make A Difference, which tutors children from challenging backgrounds. For a couple of years she taught English part time in Brescia, Italy. She has written for school magazines and local newspapers since the age of 11, and has experimented through the years with poetry writing. Her other passions are Formula 1, robotics, and cooking. She is currently a sales engineer at a robotics and automation company in Brescia, Italy. Shradha has written many exercises in the books, providing totally new angles on traditional topics of discussion

Celine

Celine Angbeletchy

Celine studied Social Sciences at the University of Pisa. After getting a CELTA certificate in 2013, she began working as a teacher and a private tutor for cultural organisations, NGOs, and language schools in Italy and in the UK. She has worked in London for Embassy English and Bellerbys College, where she taught all general English levels, IELTS and English for Academic Studies with a prevalence of students from South Korea, China and Hong Kong. She is currently obtaining a DipTrans certificate and is an affiliate translator at the Chartered Institute of Linguists. Celine is the editor-at-large of GRIOT, an online media platform (griotmag.com) celebrating cultural and creative diversity from Africa and the African diaspora. She is the co-founder of LIT ets, a cultural non-profit organisation which develops projects in the art’s field. She is also a music producer and a DJ by the name Ehua. She has recently released her debut EP on the London-based label Femme Culture
Mathew

Matthew Fletcher

Matt studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. After getting his CELTA, he began working for Citylangues, a business English school in Paris, and then worked at Bell where he completed his Delta. He now works in higher education. He has a long-standing interest in using controversial subjects to engage students and often laments the lack of published material addressing so-called taboo subjects or ‘PARSNIPs’ (Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex/Sexuality, Nudity/Narcotics, Isms and Pork), which led him to conduct some research of his own, concluding that there is both an appetite and need for controversial subjects to be discussed in the EFL classroom. As part of this project, he trialed material from Discussions Volume 3. In his own words: Helping writing this book and subsequently using it in the classroom has helped me to explore more challenging topics, even with (seemingly) less open-minded students. When he isn’t teaching, Matt divides his time between playing the drums, campaigning on local housing issues, and bringing up his two young boys.

Gaia Forghieri

Gaia Forghieri was born in 1997 in Capri, Italy. She has a bachelor’s and Master’s degree in physics, and is currently carrying out a PhD in physics and nanosciences. Her main interests are digital drawing, singing and writing poetry – in fact, some of her poems are included in the Discussion series. Her interest in LGBTQ+ issues made her an ideal candidate to act as a sensitivity consultant for this project.

Lynne Fraser

Lynne holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics and a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Media and Writing from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has a CELTA (Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English Language to Adults) and has taught English courses in South Africa, Poland, Spain, and England. She currently lives in Qatar where she works at Qatar National Library as English Writing Specialist, traveling every chance she gets.
Liz

Liz Hoeppner

Liz studied for her BA in English and American Literature at the University of Kent (2008) followed by an MA in Literary Studies at Aberystwyth University (2011). While studying, she co-hosted student literary conferences and interned at local and national publishing companies, including Honno Press in Wales and Penguin Books in London. Liz has taken on various roles, including: Content Production Manager at Pearson Plc, freelance editor and writer, and Project Manager at the community-focused nonprofit, 88Nine Radio Milwaukee in Wisconsin, USA. She is currently the Grants and Communications Manager at C4K, a youth-serving mentoring nonprofit in Charlottesville, USA. Her experiences living and working both in the UK and US are reflected in her eclectic exercises in four of the books in the Discussions series.

Katie

Katie Nevison

Katie studied English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, graduating with First Class Honours. She went on to complete her Masters in the same subject at Royal Holloway University of London, gaining a Distinction. At the time of her contribution to Discussions You’ve Never Had, Katie was teaching English at Wall Street English in Massa (Italy) and working privately with her own students. Katie has since moved back to the UK and is currently writing and planning campaigns for an animal welfare charity. Katie is also a novelist and lives with her husband and two dogs. 

BLOG EDITORS 

Fran Mackereth

Fran has degrees in Law with French from the Universities of Leicester and Strasbourg, and in Business with Economics from the Open University, from which she graduated with First Class Honours. During the seventeen or so years between the two, she taught EFL in the UK, Germany and South-East Asia, having gained her CELTA back when it was called the Preparatory Certificate in TEFL (and dinosaurs sill roamed the earth). She has taught all levels and all ages, both in groups and 1:1, but her primary area of interest has always been Business English, both in-company and in-class. Following a fifteen-year break from teaching, during which time she ran an award-winning blacksmith’s forge with her husband (yes, you read that right), she moved to Italy and returned to teaching. Since her return to the classroom, she has also qualified as an interlocutor for Language Cert oral exams, gained a Certificate in Online Teaching, delivered teacher training courses and written ESP materials. She is currently participating in a Creative Writing course through the University of Cambridge and developing her jam-making skills.

Ruairi Braddell

Ruairi is a CELTA-qualified English trainer. He was born in Cobh in southern Ireland, but spent a large part of his childhood in Donegal. After completing a bachelor’s and master’s degree in music in 2001, he moved to Germany in 2003. He has worked for corporate customers in various economic sectors, such as plastic and steel production, pharmaceutical, finance, and insurance. Ruairi started working full time for Learnship as a content writer in 2021 and became Business English Editor in January 2022. Ruairi has also taught business English at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, and specialized in English for the Fashion industry at the Mode Design College Düsseldorf. Check out his blog: www.englishexpert.de

Kirstie Jackson Wilms

Kirstie worked as a face-to-face General English trainer in Oxford before moving to Germany in 2010, where she continued to teach (mainly) Business English online. She joined the Publishing team of an online training provider in 2018. Kirstie holds a CELTA and has recently completed DELTA certification. Her professional interests are in developing learner autonomy through materials writing and classroom practice. In her free time she enjoys hiking, reading crime novels, and visiting museums. Check out her blog: https://tefl45.wordpress.com/

Tim Julian

Tim got on a bus bound for Italy in 1982, armed only with a scribbled address, a preparatory teaching certificate and 100 pounds to tide him over. What was only ever intended to be a bit of fun before getting a Proper Job turned, (he’s still not quite sure how) into a career. He has worked in Hungary and Spain as well as Italy, and for many years he was the Director of Studies at International House La Spezia in Italy, where he still works part-time as a teacher. Tim has been a Cambridge speaking examiner for many years and has also done bits and bobs of editorial work for various ELT publishers. In his spare time he reads, listens to a variety of music with a special fondness for the Grateful Dead, and hides behind a sofa when his football team (Spurs) are turning his hair greyer.

Gráinne Newcombe

Gráinne graduated from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland with a Master’s degree in English and German. She has been living in Germany for 22 years. She taught general and business English at a private language school and at Kiel’s university of applied sciences and worked as a project assistant on the PISA 2006 study before becoming an in-house editor at a Leibniz institute affiliated with Kiel University. Gráinne has over 10 years of experience in editing academic texts in the fields of education, psychology, methodology, biology, mathematics, and chemistry. She lives in Kiel with her husband and two children.

WEBSITE DESIGN & MANAGEMENT

Daniele

Daniele Gasperi

Daniele has been working as a freelance designer for over twenty years, managing the visual, web and multimedia communication of his clients in Italy and abroad. After graduating in Art and Visual Communications (Pisa, Italy), he studied Semiotics and Mass Communications in Bologna, television production in Barcelona, and markup languages for the web at Santa Monica College. He has a Masters in User Experience Design and Information Architecture at IULM University (Milan). From 2006 to 2014, Daniele worked for Accordent Technologies and Polycom in California as a User Interface Designer and Team Manager of User Interface development departments for web applications. Since 2019, Daniele has been working as an External Service Provider of User Experience (UX) consultancy and design for the Enterprise Europe Network IT platform of the EISMEA Agency of the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. For the Discussions series, Daniele collaborated with Adrian on the graphic design of the book covers of the series he then produced. He formatted the books in the series and managed the publication on Amazon. He designed the original version of the tefldiscussions.com website.