Meet James · the teacher
Hello. I’m James.
An English teacher from the West Midlands, UK. Twelve years in, with 350,000 of you on YouTube and rising — and students in more than fifty countries.
BA Languages & Linguistics, NottinghamTESOL Cert IV, AICOL Australia12 years teachingIELTS specialist
The short version
Twelve years of saying it out loud.
I studied languages and linguistics at the University of Nottingham — German and Spanish, and how languages actually work in the mouth — then trained as an English teacher and never stopped. Classrooms, companies, one-to-one, and for the last few years a YouTube channel that somehow grew to 350,000 people.
Most of what I teach comes down to one idea: the English in your textbook is correct, and nobody speaks it. Real English is faster, softer and lazier than the book, and once you can hear that, you can say it. That’s the whole job.
I’ve taken hundreds of students to their IELTS band, taught teams inside international companies, and spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time on the schwa. These days I teach online, from Thailand, to people everywhere.
How I teach
Conversations, not drills.
You speak more than you listen.
Lessons are conversations. Real ones — about your job, your life, the film you saw. I fix things as we go, quietly, without stopping the flow.
Mistakes are welcome here.
Nobody makes you feel stupid here. That’s the difference. You’ll try things you’ve never said out loud, and that’s the whole point.
Sounds first.
If you know 2,000 words but pronounce 1,000 of them wrongly, people still won’t understand you. So we start with how English actually sounds.
Off duty
Things we might have in common.
Tap the ones that are you. Students keep telling me this is the bit that made them book.