Literacy is a field I'm very passionate about. Teaching children to read isn't divergent from teaching English learners to speak (as I do in the Backpacker's Guide series) they are two sides of the same alphabet-doesn't-make-sense coin. The breakdown for both is poorly trained teachers with no idea the damage they cause by mindlessly repeating old wives tales about English that have been around for a long time, but were never true. ESL and Literacy deliver garbage material and lay blame on the learner when success isn't realized. Shame on Education.

As 2018 draws to a close it's a time for reflection and making plans for what is to come.
2018 was awesome. Late 2017 I had a stroke of genius to super-simplify the bare bones of spoken English and present those bones in a way that any one, even those with no formal training could effectively coach a learner's conversation improvement. Sounds, words, sentences, connected speech, expressions and non-verbal clues are all there really is to dialogue and those topics broke down nicely into three separate booklets - Pronunciation, Conversation and Fluency.