Jonathan Marks
Language Awareness author
I come from Leeds. I did my first degree at the University of Cambridge, and then a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, during which I quickly abandoned my ambition to teach children in the UK state system. But at the end of that year I got a summer job teaching English as a foreign language to adults, found that I liked it, and I've never looked back since.
I live in Poland, on the Baltic coast, and work on a freelance basis as a teacher, teacher-trainer, writer and translator. Before Poland I worked in Germany, Sweden, and for a long time at ILC in Hastings, England. While I was there, I did an MA in TEFL at Reading and round about the same time joined IATEFL and started attending the annual conferences. For me this was an important step towards becoming part of a bigger, international community of teachers, and expanding my horizons beyond the classroom and the day-to-day work of teaching. I was one of the founder members of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group, and at the moment I'm its joint co-ordinator. I've also served on the main IATEFL committee and the publications committee.
I'm the author of English Pronunciation in Use - Elementary (CUP), and co-author of the Inside Out Grammar Companions (Macmillan), Inside Teaching (Macmillan), The Pronunciation Book (Longman), and Bridges (Klett), an adult course for German-speaking learners. I've been a member of the authorial team of two Polish-English dictionaries, I wrote language study articles for Macmillan's Phrasal Verbs Plus and the new edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary, and I'm a contributor to the onestopenglish website and the MED webzine.
I like studying languages and tracing connections between them, and I'm - still - intrigued by the question: Given that so many people in the world learn foreign and second languages informally, without books, teachers and so on, how can formal instruction help most effectively, as opposed to interfering with the learning process?