About Us

Almost 40% of English learner drop out of high school in the US. This program is designed for them. There are a lot of programs that work well for the other 60%. If they work for you, go ahead and enjoy them. This program is for the rest of us.

I was in the middle of earning my Masters in Reading when I discovered I was dyslexic. My favorite story about teaching a dyslexic student is when a student was struggling with a concept and I asked him why he thought it was making him so angry. “Because I’m stupid!” he said. I told him I had worked with stupid people, and they don’t care. “You’re angry because you know you are smart enough to learn this but your not getting it.” It’s important when you are struggling to know you really are okay and you will get it eventually if you just keep trying.

My experience over many years supports the research that says anyone can learn something if they get enough repetition and multi-modalities. I have simplified all the concepts of English so that you can use these programs (in all their modalities) to get enough repetition for any student to succeed.

People say that English is a hard language to learn. But the truth is it is no more complicated than any other language. The first problem with English is that we use five vowels to make eighteen sounds. This is easily explained in the 7 syllables. “But so many of the words don’t make sense the way they are spelled,” I often hear. The 7 rules explain away all those complications.

However, when I moved to China to teach at the University of Ganzhou, I found that students had mastered reading English but over 80% of them could not speak it. The main reason I saw them struggle was anxiety. I design all of my programs to be anxiety free.

Once you can read English you need to have an anxiety free way to speak it. This is where I came up with Scene Study for Speaking English. This is done by watching a short scene of two people having a conversation. I give students as much support as they need to understand every word of the conversation. Then they can follow the script and have the conversation out loud with a “friend.”

I say a “friend” because in all my worldly travels, when I met someone who spoke English well, I asked them how they did it. They always replied, “I had a friend who spoke English.” I cannot be everyone’s friend but I can assign students a “friend” in class to work with. Together they work on the script until they are speaking English with clarity and confidence.

I hope this program is of help to you and your students.