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English for Speakers of Other Languages

The Pragmatics of Tactical Vagueness: Why C1 Negotiators Fail by Being Too Direct

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Or: why ‘we do not agree with this price’ is worse than saying nothing Most English teaching pushes hard toward directness and transactional clarity, say what you mean, mean what you say, avoid ambiguity. That’s the right instinct for most contexts. It’s actively wrong in one specific, high-stakes context: negotiation. C1+ speakers trained toward directness […]

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Your Own WRAP: A Structured Way to Handle Exam and Meeting Nerves

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Or: a genuine NHS recovery tool, repurposed for a much smaller kind of crisis I use a Wellness Recovery Action Plan, WRAP, a structured self-management tool developed within NHS Recovery College training, and I’ve used it, in one form or another, for years. It was built for genuinely serious situations, but the underlying structure, naming

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Prompting for Fluency: Using AI as a Low-Stakes Rehearsal Partner Without Losing Your Voice

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Or: what AI is actually good for, and where it quietly starts working against you I use AI tools myself, and I recommend them to students, with real caveats. The honest version of this advice isn’t ‘avoid AI’ or ‘let AI do the work’, it’s understanding specifically what it’s good for and where it starts

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The Pedagogy of Over-Engineering: A Satirical Guide to Making English Unnecessarily Complicated

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Or: how to say nothing at all in five hundred words, professionally Somewhere in the last few decades, professional English developed a parasite. It doesn’t help you communicate. It replaces communication with the appearance of communication, at considerably greater length. Here, in the spirit of public service, is a complete guide to producing it. Step

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The Language of Maritime Law: Precision, Hedging, and Defending a Thesis in a Second Language

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Or: what happens when a boardroom becomes a legal panel Most academic English advice is written for essays and exams. It rarely covers what happens when the audience isn’t a marker but a panel, and the format isn’t a written answer but a live, adversarial defence of your own work. I tutored Master’s candidates at

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Debugging Your Syntax: What Systems Diagnostics Can Teach Us About Language Errors

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Or: your grammar mistakes aren’t failures, they’re bug reports Before I taught English, I spent years in IT consultancy, specifying systems, fixing what other people had broken, tracing a fault back to its actual cause rather than the symptom someone happened to notice first. It turns out that instinct transfers almost directly to how I

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ACE in Life: Meaning Through Creation, Relationships, and Suffering

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Or: what a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz has to do with learning a language The ACE framework, Attitude, Creation, Experience, comes originally from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who identified three routes to meaning after surviving the concentration camps: through what we create, through what we encounter (relationships, beauty, love), and through the stance we choose

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ACE in Exams: Attitude, Creation, and Experience Under a Clock

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Or: why the same framework that helps in a meeting helps in a speaking test Exam preparation tends to focus entirely on content, grammar accuracy, vocabulary range, task structure. All necessary. None of it addresses what actually happens in the room when the clock starts and the pressure is real. The same ACE framework I

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ACE at Work: Attitude, Creation, and Experience Under Real Pressure

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Or: three questions worth asking before, during, and after the moment that actually matters Most workplace English advice is about vocabulary and phrasing, the right words for the meeting, the email, the negotiation. That’s necessary but not sufficient. What actually determines whether the language works in the moment is something underneath the words: your attitude

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Weak Forms and Connected Speech: Why Native English Sounds Faster Than It Is

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Or: ‘waitin’ fr’a bus’ isn’t sloppy, it’s how the language actually works Most English learners are taught to pronounce every word at full strength, and most native speakers don’t. Function words, ‘to,’ ‘for,’ ‘of,’ ‘and,’ ‘can,’ ‘was’, collapse to almost nothing in natural speech, replaced by a neutral, unstressed vowel (the schwa) or dropped from

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