I am currently working as a part-time lecturer at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. This means I drive down the motorway a couple of times a week from Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, where I live, to the ‘city of the dreaming spires’. I teach on EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses, which is mainly study skills, having spent a lifetime in ESP – teaching business English and English for Specific purposes for a company called Linguarama.

I began teaching at Linguarama in Madrid, nearly 30 years ago now, with chalk and a blackboard. It was great to be back in Spain recently at a conference where everyone was talking about interactive whiteboards! My wife is Spanish, and divides her time between Stratford and Madrid. We lived in Finland for three years, which is as big a contrast as you can find in Europe! Working for Linguarama involved running writing skills sessions from Cairo to Korea, and running seminars in Germany.

I love my job as the contributor of reviews of ELT materials in the EL Gazette. This means I get all the latest books, which are still stored in my garage, and it certainly keeps me up-to-date with the latest course books.

I am known to be a self-confessed conference ‘junkie’ and have spoken at conferences such as  IATEFL, TESOL, JALT and BESIG. One of the most daunting talks ever was the technology plenary speech at LABCI-ABCI in São Paolo, Brazil in 2007. There were over 1,000 teachers in the room and four massive screens behind me. I reckon I had 20 seconds to get the teachers on my side, and of course, they were a wonderful and enthusiastic audience. I cannot wait for Buenos Aires this year.

I was so frustrated that there were NO books on CD-ROM that I wrote one. Then as co-author of The Internet and Business English (2003 Summertown Publishing), I was over the moon when it was Highly Commended in the Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union awards, 2004. That took me to Buckingham Palace, one of the best days in my life! As a good Englishman, I cannot ‘blow my own trumpet’ so I shan’t mention that Blended Learning: using technology in and beyond the language classroom (Macmillan 2007) was shortlisted for the Ben Warren International House Trust prize, 2008.

I love writing a regular business English e-lesson which has thousands of subscribers around the world. A good example was when I saw someone at a conference in Japan using Twitter recently. In the space of a few days, I found out what Twitter is, wrote a lesson on it, which was then edited and made into a pdf for global distribution. That’s the power and currency of the Internet for language learning materials! I have also written CD-ROMs for Macmillan’s In Company and The Business series.

A bizarre development for a man who does not understand how apostrophes work is that I am the current Editor for the CALL Review, the newsletter of the Learning Technologies SIG of IATEFL. This is great, as I get to commission (i.e. beg) articles from technology luminaries and gurus from around the world. I am also a member of the Macmillan Dictionary Advisors’ Committee. Because I was only working a mere six days a week, I thought it would be a good idea to start a company, Pete Sharma Associates, which I have done with some ELT colleagues, to pursue my twin professional loves: technology and teacher training. You can read more about me on my website www.te4be.com which I share with Barney Barrett.

When I am not at work, I can be found watching DVDs. I am a terribly absentee father, and thankfully I can now bond with my 20-year old daughter, studying psychology at Kent, by asking her about her Virtual Learning Environment, dictaphone and mind-mapping software. We have a dog, so when I need to get away from it all, you can find me on the hills overlooking Stratford, in the rain.