Derek HainesHaving been a CELTA ESL teacher and a language teacher trainer for more years than I care to remember, I have decided to focus my energies on sharing my passion for English language teaching. I still teach ESL as an independent teacher in Switzerland, but I have reduced my hours in recent years and now only work close to home. No more trains or peak hour traffic for me.

Working with local companies and business professionals is a pleasure for me, and I am very fortunate to have such wonderful students to work with, and many for quite some years now.

As a firm advocate of the Direct Method of language teaching, technology in recent years has taken on a very important role for me in my classes. Images, in particular, are now so much easier to find and use in class, and the advent of the iPad and other tablets has been a huge teaching bonus.

All the kilos (pounds) of lesson materials, books, audio cassettes, and later, CDs, along with grammar exercise books and huge bundles of images cut from magazines that I used to lug around Geneva in a small wheelie suitcase, in the snow and ice, or the heat of summer are thankfully long gone. All of that weight is now in next to weightless digital form on my increasing number of iPads.

The idea of sharing all this digitised material with adult ESL learners and fellow TEFL teachers has been on my mind for some time, and finally, I am now getting around to doing it. It will take some time to prepare and upload the gigabytes of material I have, but little by little, hopefully, this site will grow in value for you through my experience, advice and materials.

My other passions are writing and blogging. I have a number of titles published, plus a couple of popular blogs that keep me busy.

If you would like to know more about me, you can visit my website, or connect with me on Linkedin or Twitter.

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