Dr Amanda Howard has a PhD in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics from the University of Warwick and an MEd TESOL from the University of Leeds. She has been an English language teacher, manager, teacher trainer and subsequently a university lecturer for many years and has a wealth of experience in both TESOL and Education.

Amanda was based in the Arabian Gulf for thirty years, but also spent some of that time working for UK universities, predominantly Russell Group, which she continues to do on a freelance basis. While in the Middle East she started her TESOL career working for the British Council, but soon also became involved in teacher training and setting up language schools. She then moved into the tertiary education sector, teaching at colleges and then universities, and was involved in the writing and development of the first bachelor degree in TESOL designed specifically for Gulf nationals in the UAE. Her most recent academic post in the Middle East was as TESOL Coordinator at the first postgraduate university in the region, the British University in Dubai, which was accredited by the University of Birmingham. Amanda is now based in the UK, working mainly for the University of Leeds, but still travels to the Middle East and Latin America on a regular basis.

Amanda’s research covers observation, feedback and teacher evaluation, which she has written and spoken about in a broad range of international locations. She is also very involved in using TESOL methodology to teach second languages, having first worked on this in 2013, and in 2019 she shared the delivery of an ‘Intensive Arabic Grammar Teaching’ course to a group of international teachers of Arabic as a second language at the University of Leeds. In 2020 she began work with Peter Willems who was engaged in the development of the four-module Certificate in Arabic Teaching which is currently offered by CAS.

Areas of Expertise: Teacher Education/Training and Development, Observation and Feedback, Teacher Evaluation, Young Learner Education