An overview of how our founder and main teacher developed our unique output based syllabus.

I decided to move to Malta in 2007. I had two jobs in the insurance industry waiting for me to choose from, but in the end I decided that it was also time for a career change. I studied and trained to become a fully qualified EFL teacher.

Coming from a business background, I spent my first few years teaching business English and general English. Mostly adult classes and general English classes. Eventually, I realised that teaching pre-intermediate adult classes was what I enjoyed most. The students are almost always highly motivated and have a genuine passion for finding solutions to grammar and pronunciation problems.

In 2010 I left my first school, EC Malta. Specialising in teaching adult learners led me towards teaching IELTS, FCE and CAE exam preparation classes. My lessons were very student focused, I always tried to minimise teacher talk time. I started to develop my own pronunciation exercises and grammar lessons.

During my first seven or eight years of teaching, I suppose I just considered myself to be a pretty regular, ordinary ESL teacher. Little did I know, that was all about to change. In 2015, private ESL schools in Malta decided to start offering a new type of course. Usually, students would start their general classes at 0900 and finish at 1230. Some students would opt for an extra group lesson or one-to-one session and finsh their school day at 1430.

Under the new system, schools in Malta started to offer students the possibility to start their lessons at 1230 instead of 0900, albeit for a slightly cheaper price. This now meant that a full time ESL teacher like myself could now start at 0900 and continue all the way to 1800. The move from a 22.5 contact hour week to 37.5 hours was to be a complete game changer.

By the end of 2015, I was completely exhausted. However, teaching so many lessons and so many students in one year had been a complete eye opener. I realised that there was so much that standard ESL coursebooks were missing, and in many cases getting completely wrong. I had lots of ideas for new material and methods.

Early in 2016, I decided to return to EC Malta. I was eager to start experimenting with new material in an environment where I knew that I could fully test and develop a new syllabus. I knew that at EC Malta, I would have the best available resources and an admin team that were more like family than mere colleagues.

The testing began...

The vast majority of ESL/EFL coursebooks are based on a format set in stone by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. In the past four decades, these coursebooks and their content have come to dominate the world of teaching English.

The problem is, these coursebooks were initially designed to solve a problem. That problem was, how to enable university graduates with very little teaching experience to be able to hit the ground running in any classroom in any country in the world.

The Oxford and Cambridge way did succeed in solving that problem. At the same time, they inadvertently caused a series of unforeseen consequences. In an effort to try and simplify what is taught for the benefit of the inexperienced teacher, much of what would be beneficial to learners of English is simply missed out and not mentioned. Worse yet, in some cases the grammar has been simplified to the point that what is taught to the students is entirely incorrect.

Some my find this hard to believe. We would ask you to give our courses a try and see how we can help you to finally understand everything you ever wanted to know about English Grammar.