Mary Bowen

After graduating from the University of Kent with a degree in French and no definite career in mind, I found a job teaching English at a language school in London. After enjoying three years in this ‘temporary’ post, I decided that some proper teaching qualifications were called for and I returned to university to study for a PGCE specialising in TEFL at the University of Bangor in North Wales. more

Printha died tragically in September 2004. You can read a tribute to her here. She had a BA (Hons) degree and was also granted an MA in English Literature from Leeds University and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Birmingham University. She taught English as a foreign and second language for many years throughout the world, including Thailand, Libya and France. She was also a teacher trainer in Europe. In 1992-1993, she was the British Council Summer School writer in residence at Durham University, where the theme was 'Innovations in ELT'. In the course of her writing career, she wrote a number of course and skills books, including Surprise (Macmillan), a best-selling kindergarten course, Pyramid (Macmillan), Skill of Reading (Thomas Nelson) and Counterpoint (Thomas Nelson). Click here for Printha's own account of her work.

Adrian Tennant

Adrian was born in Nottingham – home to Robin Hood – in 1966. After taking his TEFL Cert he started teaching in Spain and has since lived and worked in France, Hungary, Ecuador and the UK.

While he was working in Hungary he took his MEd on a distance programme with Sheffield University.

In recent years he has run workshops and teacher training courses in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan as well as in the UK.

He has written web based materials for a number of Macmillan courses, including: Way Ahead, Smart, Prospects, Inside Out, Skyline, English Upgrade and The Macmillan English Dictionary. He also regularly writes the Web Quest for the onestopenglish web magazine. He is also the materials advisor and co-author of three coursebooks – English Matters – written for schools in Uzbekistan.

He is currently working part-time for New College Nottingham where, among other things, he is responsible for developing courses for non-native teachers on areas such as teaching ‘culture’ and ‘materials design’.

He also works as a freelance teacher trainer.