RICHMOND - Key Persons
Daniel started teaching by accident 20 years ago in a secondary school in Mexico. He enjoyed the experience enough to do his cert on his return to Britain and get a job in a language school. He worked in Oxford and then London, clawed his way up to lower management, then moved to Barcelona. There he began teacher training. In 2003 he moved to Cádiz in the south of Spain, where he helped to open and run a language and teacher training school. He has worked on short stories for learners (Macmillan) and is a writer for the Richmond series The Big Picture.
He is interested in learner autonomy, teacher development, motivational aspects of learning, neuroeducation, the lexical approach, receptive skills development, productive skills development, materials development…
James Styring lives and works in Oxford, England. James loves languages and cycling. He divides his time between riding, writing, teaching - and a young family.
James graduated from Nottingham University in 1990 with an honours degree in English. He has taught English and Spanish in the UK, Spain and Australia. He worked for ten years in editorial roles in the ELT departments of Heinemann (now Macmillan) and then Oxford University Press, before becoming a freelance author in 2005.
James has written more than 50 English language teaching titles, from primary and secondary schoolbooks to business and adult material, including student's books, workbooks, resource books, digital tests and games, plays and readers. Recently co-authored titles include English Plus and Look Up (both OUP). He is also a successful journalist with a regular newspaper column about cycling.
As co-author of the Richmond Mazes, James has had great fun creating interesting characters and having them explore scenarios in their quests at work - "a thoroughly refreshing and enjoyable experience".
Julia Starr Keddle is an EFL course books writer and a teacher trainer. She has been involved in ELT for nearly 30 years, teaching in Italy and the UK. She and her husband Martyn Hobbs, lived in Italy for more than 10 years, teaching at Florence University and also in private language schools. She has also taught children, teenagers and adults extensively in the UK and has trained teachers at NILE, Norwich. She returned to live in Britain and worked in publishing at OUP where she developed multi-level course books for secondary schools. She still lives in Oxford.
Julia and Martyn write together, combining their teaching experience with their creativity and shared vision to make learning not only motivating, involving and fun, but also easy-to-use in the classroom. They have written many successful courses, including Get Real and For Real (Helbling Languages), Your Space (CUP), Activate (Balberry) and Oxford English for Careers: Commerce (OUP). They have also written levels of Star Players (Richmond) and Real Life (Pearson). Their latest course for Richmond is three levels of Thumbs Up!.
Julia is especially interested in teen development, interactional language and personal and ‘soft skills'. She is a specialist in the Common European Framework on which she has written articles, including ‘The CEF and the secondary school syllabus' for the publication Insights from the Common European Framework (OUP). She finds that planning a course is a very creative process, and enjoys interweaving grammar, communicative and lexical syllabus strands, among others, with age-appropriate topics and activities to provide a solid foundation. Writing is fun, but a successful course is built on creative planning.
Julia loves looking for interesting topics and texts. This explains the enormous boxes of cuttings, piles of magazines, and notebooks that fill her home! And when she travels she also loves to eavesdrop in order to capture real English. Finally, Julia is also a trained garden designer. A beautiful garden needs a strong ground plan, should be full of interest and variety, but be easy to use and live with all year round. Not so different from a course book!
Luiz Otávio Barros (MA Hons in Applied Linguistics, Lancaster University) has been teaching, training teachers, designing language courses and writing ELT materials since 1992. Formerly academic coordinator at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo, where he was responsible for the advanced levels, as well as COTE, DOTE and DELTA tuition, head of research and development at Associação Alumni São Paulo, where he was in charge of the adult segment, and BRAZ-TESOL's second vice president, Luiz Otávio is co-author of Richmond's English ID, Identities and the new Young Adult course Personal Best, as well as series editor of Access, published by Richmond Brazil. He has also self-published The Only Academic Phrasebook You'll Ever Need, available on Amazon.
Paul Seligson has been involved in TEFL for over 30 years and is well-known globally for giving lively, highly practical talks and training sessions. He has taught in Algeria, France, Egypt, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Mexico, the UK and Spain where he spent 5 years as ADOS at the British Council in Valencia. He also set up and ran his own language school in Brighton and has vast experience at all levels of school management.
An MA in TEFL and a CELTA assessor, his many primary, secondary and adult publications include Helping Students to Speak for the Richmond Teacher's Handbook Series, which he also edits, English File (OUP), English Teacher's Portfolio (British Council, Brazil), Essential English 1-5 and Kids' Web (both Richmond). In total, he has published over 40 books, along with scores of articles in international magazines. He has trained teachers in four continents, run COTE, DOTE, CELTA, DELTA, FTBE, Graduate and Post-graduate courses and given hundreds of conference sessions worldwide, in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. He has also done consultancy work at scores of universities in Europe, North Africa, Western and Central Asia, and Latin America, and set up observation programmes in Spain, Turkey and Mexico. Most recently, he has been involved in providing training for State School teachers around Brazil.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, he works as a freelance teacher, trainer, author and consultant.