About Ian
Or: what actually happens in a lesson, and why
I’m Ian Springham, and I teach English from Gozo, in Malta, mostly online, to people who need it to do something specific: pass an exam, run a meeting, make a career move, or just stop translating in their head before they speak.
How I actually teach
Grammar drilled in isolation doesn’t transfer to a real conversation, so I don’t lead with it. Lessons are built around the situations you’re actually going to be in, a negotiation, an interview, a presentation, and the grammar gets addressed as it comes up inside that, not as a separate exercise bolted on beforehand. The aim isn’t to cover a syllabus. It’s for you to leave able to do the specific thing you couldn’t do before.
Who I’ve taught
A genuinely wide spread, managers, entrepreneurs, university students, people between jobs, people prepping for a specific exam with a specific date attached. What they have in common is a concrete reason for being there, which is usually a better starting point than general enthusiasm for English.
Background
CertTESOL from Trinity College London, 2013. Over 10,000 hours of teaching since, most of it now online, a shift I made in 2018 well before it became the norm. Before teaching, I spent years in IT consultancy, which turns out to matter more than it sounds, a lot of what separates competent English from effective English is the same thing that separates a working system from a good one: knowing exactly what the other person actually needs to hear.
On using AI to learn
I don’t think AI replaces a teacher, but pretending it isn’t a genuinely useful practice tool would be dishonest. Used well, it’s good for low-stakes rehearsal, drafting something and getting fast feedback on it, building vocabulary in context rather than from a list. Used badly, it becomes a crutch that produces fluent-sounding text you can’t actually reproduce yourself in a live conversation. Part of what I do is help students tell the difference.
If you want to start
The first step is a free consultation, no pitch, just a conversation about what you actually need and whether I’m the right fit for it.