Jane Howes

Jane has worked in EFL since 1989.  After completing a B.Ed and DipTEFL in Australia, she worked in Australia and Asia for 10 years, teaching, training and developing programmes in Japan, Thailand and Vietnam.  In Vietnam she was project manager for an educational infrastructure-building programme partially funded by the Australian Government.  As well as managing an international team of teachers, she developed and taught on programmes in areas as diverse as English for pilots and English for police officers.

During her time in Vietnam and Australia, she completed an MA in Linguistics, which included a major in distance education and focussed on the adaptation of face-to-face programmes to distance mode.  This marked the beginning of an awareness of some of the issues involved in teaching and training in distance mode – though there have, of course, been many developments both in technology and practice since 1998.

Finally wrenching herself away from Asia in 1998, she began a new phase of her career in Europe, focussing mainly on developing and teaching ESP courses and teacher training.  Since 2002, she has worked as a freelance teacher trainer and writer based in Barcelona.  Working with Netlanguages in Barcelona, she designed an online IELTS preparation course which has been published by McGraw Hill and is proving popular with students in a number of countries including Spain and China.  She is currently designing a research project to learn more about how different individuals engage with the course, involving case studies of past and present students.