Hello, my name is Andrew, and welcome to my IELTS and English website.

Well, I have seen and done a great deal in my career, so much it is hard to make this entry brief. I’ve worked in Taiwan on three separate occasions, and in that time I actually helped establish many IELTS preparation schools here in Taipei.

More specifically, I have over 25 years experience as an English teacher in five different countries, from Venezuela to Korea, but more importantly for you, I began teaching preparation for IELTS in 1994, and have been very much involved with IELTS since then, eventually making it my specialised field. For example, I spent five years teaching at Monash University Language Centre in Australia, where I was the IELTS ‘specialist’, and where I began writing my IELTS books.

As for my personal life, I married a Taiwanese woman (in Australia), and we have one child – a boy, who everyone insists is extremely cute. He must take after his mother, right? I am a keen chess player, and a hobby writer. Click here to see two pieces of my own creative literature: a travelogue called ‘A Saharan Jaunt’, and a novel called ‘Promise Me, Promise Me’ (and hey, you could buy them also!)

I now provide IELTS Preparation or English Skills Courses to small and selects groups of students, but I occasionally help some students with the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

Here’s one final note. For the last 15 years I have been creating and refining PowerPoint presentations as the basis of my teaching. These presentations have been designed to be visual, animated, interesting, and to maximise your learning, and I work continuously to improve them. These programs focus exactly on the task – that is, the IELTS test, whether that be listening, reading, writing (Task One and Two), speaking, and related grammars. To repeat, after 15 years of development, these presentations are simply the best in the world, and they are only getting better.

 

Online Teaching

I have decided that the future of IELTS Preparation is online – in fact, the idea of physically face-to-face teaching now seems VERY old fashioned. Think about it. IELTS students are:

• adults, with the ability to concentrate,
• able to use computers (with Zoom, Google Meet, or MS Teams),
• interested in their learning, and trying hard to achieve a specific goal.

Online teaching IS:

• actually face-to-face [we can all see each others faces],
• great for very specific feedback [e.g. I put your writing on the screen to help explain my correction],
• particularly suited to my style of teaching – that is, with advanced PowerPoint programs, which can be run on a shared screen.

Regarding that ‘face-to-face’ comment, programs such as Zoom, Google Meet, or MS Teams are very advanced, with many sophisticated features, and it does indeed sometimes seem as if the students and I are all simply sitting together in a room, talking to each other.

Finally, online teaching offers all the obvious advantages of:

• no travel, and thus saving you time and money,
• greater convenience,
• fewer distractions.

So, why would any IELTS student now want a physical classroom? What does a physical classroom actually have that makes it better? I honestly cannot think of anything.

I can, however, for 1-1 teaching or small groups, offer a physical classroom (at 華龍文理補習班 – [See the location page] and I’m told that does not translate too well into English – or at my office location), but I believe online is now the way to go.

See you in my (online) class.