english out there
Jason West is the founder and chief creator of English Out There. He now has
almost thirty years of self-employed experience in transformational English
language teaching and learning. In 1992, at the age of 25, he co-founded an
English language school in the heart of London’s West End and within two and
half years the school achieved British Council accreditation (which annoyed a
few people!). A long-standing interest in the psychology of learning lead Jason
to feel that something could be done to improve the way his students acquired
English. As a result he created the English Out There (EOT) course concept,
where students engage directly with fluent or native speakers at every stage of
their language development. The language laboratory in EOT's case was (and still
is) the streets of London and members of the public (recently we have been
experimenting successfully with handheld mobile technology and Google+ community
pages). A lot of people have helped to create English Out There over the years.
The principal EOT lieutenants have been Georgina Moon, Maria Stamati-Knipe and
Jonathan Jones whilst Tim Bowen helped edit the materials for publication. After
250,000 hours of teaching and editing English Out There course materials were
born. They can be used both offline and on. The online element came out of a
fascination with social media and free internet telephony such as Facebook and
Skype. An interesting quirk of their design is that they will work with any and
all social media platforms, even those not yet invented! The inexpensive
DRM-free course materials for students and teachers recently made the EU’s top
10 formal uses of social media for language learning and can be purchased online
from this website. English Out There is the only English program we know of that
posts 'before and after' audio and video proof of the amazing progress of real
students. It is a truly transformational English course because learners who
have tried and failed to speak English comfortably for years find that it helps
them to break through their personal language barriers. Using just simple file
formats and free online social media, allowing teachers to earn money from the
use of the content and making it available at an affordable price is important
to Jason and the ethos of English Out There (a student's self-study course costs
just £9.99 and can change a life because it will teach you how to learn for
yourself for free going forward; a teacher's course level, also 20 lessons/60
hours can be printed and taught as much as they like commercially for just
£25.00).
