I am an educational consultant, teacher trainer and writer based in Madrid. As part of my work, I have frequently acted as a young learner consultant for organisations such as the British Council, the Council of Europe, Cambridge ESOL and Ministries of Education in different countries. I am also an assessor of courses leading to the Cambridge ESOL Certificate in English Language Teaching to Young Learners (CELTYL) and YL Extension to CELTA. 

For many years, I have been actively involved in doing voluntary work for IATEFL. For eight years, I was on the committee of the Young Learner Special Interest Group and joint editor of its publication, Children and Teenagers. I am currently serving my third year on the Publications Committee, which has overall responsibility for the Association’s publications and website.

As a teacher, I have over thirty years' experience working with adults, secondary students and primary school children in a number of different countries, including Venezuela, Portugal and Spain. For several years, I worked as Assistant Director of Studies at the British Council Young Learner Centre in Madrid, where I was responsible for academic management and teacher development, and also introduced new courses for very young learners from the age of five.

Teacher Education has long been one of my main interests and I have over twenty-five years’ experience working with teachers, teacher trainers and educational managers in a wide range of contexts in both the private and state sectors. I have run numerous in-service teacher education courses for organisations and teaching institutions in many different countries including Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, the UK (for primary teachers of French) and Uruguay.

As a regular presenter at regional, national and international ELT conferences, I am in  contact with many teachers in countries all over the world. This opportunity to be in touch with fellow professionals working in so many different cultures and contexts is, for me, one of the main things which makes ELT education such an exciting profession to belong to.

I first started out in ELT after obtaining a first-class BA Honours degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. An initial teacher training qualification gave me a passport to travel and I got my first job teaching English to children and university students at the British Institute in Caracas, Venezuela. Some time later, I worked for the British Council in Lisbon, Portugal where I taught English to students of all ages and levels. During this time, I obtained the RSA Diploma, became a teacher trainer, did an MA in Language Teaching and Linguistics at the University of York and wrote my first book. My desire to specialise in working with young learners grew considerably after having my own children (now adults), when I became increasingly interested in child development, bi-lingualism and foreign language teaching and learning within the context of mainstream education and children’s overall development – all areas which continue to fascinate me and form a central part of my work.

My publications with co-authors over the years include Tandem (Evans 1981), Themes (Nelson 1982), Pyramid (Collins, 1985), Tandem Plus (Longman 1991), English Club (Heinemann 1992),  Superworld (Macmillan Heinemann 2000), Hello, Robby Rabbit (Macmillan Education 2002), Here’s Robby! (Macmillan Education, 2002), two DVDs and accompanying activity books for pre-school children The Patch and Robby Show 1 & 2 (Macmillan 2005) and Bugs (Macmillan Education, 2005) which won a British Council Innovation Award in 2006. In addition to this, I have written Instant Lessons: Fairy Tales (Penguin Longman 2001), teacher support materials for the British Council Magic Pencil Exhibition which you can also find on this site www.teachingenglish.org.uk/try/teaching-kids/magic-pencil, several children’s readers, including a re-telling of Is it a butterfly? (Macmillan 2004) which won an Extensive Reading Foundation award in 2005, and many articles on teaching English to children. My most recent publications are 500 Activities for the Primary Classroom (Macmillan 2007) which was Highly Commended in the Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Awards for 2007 and Footprints (Macmillan, 2009), a new higher level primary course with an emphasis on content and culture.

I have recently started a blog on teaching children www.carolread.wordpress.com which I would love you to visit and join in. There’s also more about my work as well as downloadable articles, materials, handouts and powerpoint versions of some of my talks on my website www.carolread.com