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The candidate has begun the role play with the examiner confidently, with a polite greeting to the examiner or rather interlocutor, as the assessment is done later by a third party listening to the recording of the test. The consultation has begun and the candidate is fulfilling the task outlined on their role play card. The grammar is accurate, the pace of the consultation is controlled, and the candidate is using the standard phrases used in a consultation.

Then something derails the whole test. The patient (examiner) says, ‘My sister took these tablets and she was never well on them. She felt sick all the time and couldn’t cope. I don’t want to end up the same way.’

The candidate says, ‘I understand your concern,’ and immediately continues with the correct prepared explanation of the dosage and possible side effects.

So, what went wrong. Well, the phrase sounds empathetic and fluent, with no errors in the English language. However, ask yourself this – has the patient’s concern really been addressed? It has been acknowledged but that’s it. There is no effective response to their worries about the medication. Even more importantly, is the patient going to take the medicine they need unless these concerns have been properly addressed with a full explanation in language they understand?

This is the important thing about the OET Speaking Test. It is not only testing the candidate’s knowledge of English, but also their skill at carrying out a consultation with a patient. It is an examination for clinicians, and it is a test of how well they use English in a clinical setting with patients and colleagues.

Simply demonstrating empathy, asking standard questions, repeating the information on the role play card and completing the tasks given is not going to make the grade. The consultation is not a performance, with a collection of useful phrases delivered smoothly at the right stage of the process. A real consultation doesn’t work like that, and nor does an OET role-play that gets the Grade B required for most jobs.

The test is short, but so are most clinical consultations. In the OET Speaking Test, the candidate completes two profession-specific role plays of about five minutes. They get three minutes to prepare each role-play. The interlocutor is playing a patient, a client, relative or carer depending on the profession of the candidate and the situation given. The role-plays are recorded and assessed by OET assessors, people other than the interlocutor present for the test. They are not awarding the score.

The OET guidelines are clear that the test assesses English rather than medical knowledge, but it is English in a professional context and this means it is a test of how well the candidate uses English in a patient consultation. It is not general English, it is professional English. Intelligibility, fluency, appropriateness of language, good range of grammar and expression, vocabulary and clinical communication are all criteria which are assessed.

What does clinical communication cover? It is important to demonstrate relationship building, understanding the patient’s perspective and addressing it, provide structure to the consultation, gather relevant information and give clear medical explanations in simple language the patient will understand?

The healthcare professional has to show that they can not only speak English, but also operate in a clinical setting, and conduct an effective, patient-centred consultation.

The role-play card is a map, not a script and it gives the candidate essential tasks. A nurse might be told to find out:

1. why a patient has stopped taking their medication

2. Reassure the patient

3. Explain the consequences of not taking their medication

4. Agree a way forward with the patient.

All of these points are important to get the grade you need for job seeking success!

The card does not give you a script, and it cannot tell you exactly what the patient will say, and what emotion will sit behind that. It cannot predict which part of the problem will become most important during the consultation. The card indicates where the consultation needs to go, but the candidate needs to listen to the patient and respond appropriately with real help and advice.

For example, if a candidate treats the bullet points as a fixed question they may move on to the next task once they have an answer but not reply to the significance of that response. Here is an example:

Patient: I stopped taking the tablets because they make me dizzy at work.

Candidate: Do you smoke?

The next question on the card may well be about smoking, but the consultation is now broken and communication is ineffective. The response from the candidate should have explored when the dizziness occurs, how the patient’s work is affected and whether they have discussed it with anyone. At this point appropriate advice needs to be given.

Only then is it acceptable to start asking about smoking habits, because it is true that completing the tasks on the card is important. However, conducting a proper, authentic consultation is even more important.

Listening is not the quiet part of the Speaking Test, and it is not a passive skill – it becomes visible through the response the candidate offers to the patient. Think about the following questions when assessing your own role-play skills:

1. Did the candidate pick up the patient’s own words and mirror them?

2. Did they clarify any uncertainty?

3. Did they notice that the patient’s real concern was the effect on work, family or independence?

4. Did they adapt an explanation after hearing what the patient had understood and what needed further clarification?

A standard learned and rehearsed question like ‘What worries you most about this?’ may uncover the patient’s perspective but this must be followed up during the consultation. If the patient says they are worried about childcare, the recommendations given must connect with the situation and address issues such as the expected recovery period from the operation, what support is available, what symptoms might require further help.

The patient has given the candidate information and said what it means in their life, and the candidate needs to respond effectively with help and information.

In general, the medical professional has much more medical knowledge than the patient and the role play tests the professional’s ability to explain their knowledge in language the patient can understand. Clear language is not a lower level of English, and not every technical term needs to be replaced with a childish one. The candidate needs to judge what the patient needs, explain unfamiliar language, present information in manageable chunks and check what the patient has understood.

A candidate may understand hypertension, the patient needs to know that this means their blood pressure is staying higher than it should and then what the risks of this are. A complex treatment plan should be divided into steps. If the patient asks a question, the explanation needs to pause. Using plain English is not evidence of limited English, and when it is used in a consultation it is evidence of control and this is assessed. The speaker needs to make appropriate choices about audience, purpose and register, because these are key in good clinical communication.

A five-minute role-play needs direction, and in real life the time given for a consultation is limited. The healthcare professional usually initiates the conversation, manages the time available and makes sure that important areas are addressed. Being patient-centred does not mean allowing the conversation to wander without purpose.

However, good structure helps the patient follow what is happening in their consultation. It provides signposting and summaries without turning the consultation into a monologue.

Questioning is open. ‘First, I would like to understand a little more about the pain. Then I’d like to talk about what is causing it and discuss what we can do next. Is that all right?’ Then pause for the patient to answer!

This utterance gives the consultation shape and it leaves room for the patient to respond and express their needs. The professional might ask later, ‘We have talked about the medication and the dizziness. Before we agree on the next step, is there anything else you are worried about?’

Structure in the Speaking Test is not just the order in which the candidate completes the tasks on the role-play card. They need to lead the patient through the consultation without hurrying past their concerns.

The three minutes of preparation time should be used carefully to:

· Identify the situation

· Identify the relationships involved and the possible emotional pressure the patient is under

· What does the patient already know?

· What worries might they have?

· What information needs to be explained in plain language

· Where should understanding be checked?

· What decision or next step is the aim of the consultation.

Don’t try and write a natural consultation, and don’t try and script full sentences to perform in the test. This prevents genuine listening and appropriate responses.

Before the day of the exam, it isn’t helpful to repeat the same role-play card until the language is smooth and fluent. This does not develop the ability to respond. Get your practice partner to vary the answers they give to questions, giving new concerns, misunderstanding part of the explanation or resisting the advice offered. The candidate will then learn effective listening, and how to respond by clarifying, acknowledging information and adapting their response to suit the patient’s needs.

By all means, record a practice role-play but do not focus on hesitations and grammar errors. Listen to the content of the consultation and ask whether it was helpful to the patient. Did they get a response to their concern? Did the consultation sound like a conversation or an interview? Did the patient get information in sections, and did they get a comprehension check? Does the patient know what will happen next?

OET is an artificial situation with a timed role-play, an interlocutor as patient, and the clinical information is limited to what is needed to complete the task. However, the communication at the centre of OET is not artificial. Consultations are normally time limited, and healthcare professionals regularly speak with people in a difficult emotional state. Patients do not always state their main concern first, and they might agree politely with an explanation they don’t understand. They may resist advice for reasons that only become clear when the professional asks open questions and listens genuinely.

The professional’s responses cannot be reduced to a bank of phrases learned parrot fashion. The exam depends on language level, but also on the professional’s attention to the situation, what the patient is saying, and to the effect on the patient of the explanation.

To summarise, preparing for OET speaking, isn’t a question of ‘what can I say to express empathy?’ but rather developing the skill to listen to the patient and judging what that has changed about the situation in the role play. A strong candidate makes the conversation feel natural, focused and useful to the patient.

A good OET teacher will develop skills for the Speaking Test, not hand you a list of phrases.

We often meet poetry on the page, in a textbook at school or on a screen, and the editing includes line numbers, footnotes and perhaps a translation into plain modern English. Old English poems are the stuff of English Literature lessons at school, and they are read silently and their poetic devices and meaning are carefully dissected and discussed.

When they were first composed, many of these works moved from their first performance in the voice of the poet, to the memory of their first audience, then into manuscript. Poetry began with the voice, not the sight of words on a page. Not every early poem began as an improvised song, and some of them were composed for a patron in manuscript form. Voice and writing were both part of the shaping of poetry, and poems were sung, recited and recorded in books.

Look at these three opening lines from different poems, and try reading them out loud. The language looks unfamiliar but it is English.

Hwaet: We Gardena in geardagum – Beowulf

Listen! We of the spear carrying Danes in the olden days (a loose translation)

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne – Piers Plowman

When the sun was mild in the summer time

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote – Chaucer

When April with its sweet showers

These quotations come from writers living in different centuries and the literary world was evolving as the language developed and society changed. However, what they have in common is that each line is composed to please the ear. Stresses strike, there is alliteration and the phrases balance each other. The meaning of the poem is contained in the combination of vocabulary but it is carried by breath, rhythm, the sound of the line.

At this time, books were written by hand and illustrated with beautiful initial capitals and pictures drawn by the scribe. The experience of opening a book was a rare one, open to the clergy and wealthy people, because books were extremely expensive and few in number. Learning a poem by hearing it read aloud or sung to an audience was probably more common than reading it from a page.

Beowulf begins with the word ‘hwaet’, translated as ‘listen!’ or even ‘lo!’ It is intended to catch the attention of the audience, to get people listening before the story begins. It recalls the opening of other earlier epic poems. Homer’s Iliad begins by asking the goddess to sing about Achilles’ anger – ‘Sing, o goddess, the anger…’ and his Odyssey starts with ‘Tell me, O Muse, of the man…’, whilst Virgil’s Aeneid starts with the line ‘Arms and the man I sing’. The poem is to be sung or spoken and the audience is called upon to listen to the performance.

Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum,

Peodcyninga, prym gefrunon …

A typical Old English line falls into two half-lines, separated by a pause, and the stressed words are alliterated. The verse does not depend on end rhyme. Printed or written, the line can appear remote or difficult, but when it is spoken or sung the structure of the line is heard. The repeated initial sounds find the sentence together and offer the reciter or singer a pattern of sound to convey. The line has cohesion, from sound as well as from meaning.

Beowulf shows us the image of poetry performance as a social act. Inside Heorot, the harp is played whilst the poet sings the creation story. Grendel is outside, and he is tormented by the sound of the celebrations, excluded from the song that makes the audience and the poet a community. The Danes are sharing a story of the world and their own place in it, but Grendel is shut out of this circle of light, fellowship and song.

The poem survives in a manuscript produced around the year 1000 AD, and so we should be cautious about seeing Beowulf as simply a relic of the age of oral literature. The date of composition of the poem and its relationship with oral tradition are still debated. The manuscript is a valuable record in written form, but the language of the text preserves a powerful sense of addressing an audience directly, recounting memory and staging a performance of the poem.

The shortest and earliest known version of ‘Piers Plowman’ dates from around 1362, but there are later texts which are further developed and revised. The opening of the poem shows the continuing energy of alliteration in English verse:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Went wide in this world wondres to here.

William Langland, Piers Plowman, B-text Prologue, dated around 1377-79

If you read these lines silently, they may appear irregular as they don’t rhyme and they don’t have a fixed number of syllables. However, if you read them aloud the musicality of the poem emerges. The ‘s’ sounds soften the summer landscape, whilst the repeated ‘w’ sounds help the wandering dreamer to move through the world. The long line has strong stresses and sound linking, making it easy on the listening ear.

The poem is believed to have been composed by William Langland although none of the principal versions or the fifty manuscripts containing them is written in his own hand. The three versions are known as the A. B and C texts, and they present a complicated textual history that prevents us from treating it as a spontaneous oral performance recorded in writing. The poem was copied, revised, enlarged and transmitted through edited manuscripts. This is not to say that the poem became silent, and its lines record patterns that emerge much better when they are spoken or sung. The manuscripts are a type of score, or arrangement of the stresses, pauses and repeated sounds of the text that a new reader can reproduce rather than a complete record of a single performance.

Chaucer places storytelling inside the vividly imagined social world of the pilgrim. The pilgrims tell one another stories and they compete with each other, interrupt, laugh, take offence with other storytellers, and cap one story with another of their own. The audience helps shape the story by participating in the storytelling process.

In ‘The Miller’s Prologue’, Chaucer indicates that the oral tradition of poetry and storytelling and written culture exist in parallel:

And therefore, whoso list it nat yeere,

Turne over the leef and chese another tale …

If we don’t wish to hear the Miller’s story, we can turn the page and choose another. It is as if one imagined audience, the pilgrims, is listening and the other, the wealthy reader with their own book, is reading the text as they choose. The written book and the audience to the storyteller on the pilgrimage are both ways that the tale reaches its audience.

The Pardoner clearly considers oral performance to be important, boasting that when he preaches, he projects a commanding voice that rings out like a bell. He has learned his material by rote and his morality is questionable, but he understands his audience. He uses repetition, the power of his voice and a well practised performance to deliver a powerful sermon.

The opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is often presented as a difficult historical text, but the metre becomes clearer when the Middle English text is read out loud and the sound is easier to follow. The final syllables of words such as shoures (showers) or soote (sweet) have been lost in modern English but reading the lines out loud restores the rhythm of the language and makes it easier to understand.

Literature teachers tend to give students a poem in written form and then start examining the theme of the poem, the literary devices used, the metrical form or for interpretations of the meaning of the text. The sound of the words has not been heard before the analysis begins. I would argue that students can listen and enjoy the poem without being asked to decode every work of it. On first reading, they can be asked to mark the stresses, find repeated consonants, mark where the breath naturally pauses (chunking) and compare the effects of different ways of reading the text, with the stress on different syllables, or with the phrases chunked differently. Meaning then emerges from the spoken language heard, as a piece of living poetry. Reading aloud is the first stage in working on a poem and it is not a substitute for analysis and interpretation but it allows students to encounter the sound effects that silent reading doesn’t convey. We cannot know how the early audiences received and heard the texts, but we can listen to the balance of Beowulf’s lines, the alliteration that gives Piers Plowman its insistent quality, and the energy of Chaucer’s story telling pilgrims.

Sources and further reading

British Library. ‘Beowulf Online’ offers an overview of the sole surviving medieval manuscript and how the story was transmitted.

O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Cambridge University Press, 1990. This is a major study of the relationship between oral practice, literacy and Old English poetic manuscripts.

The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. A scholarly open-access archive documenting the poem’s three principal versions and the extensive manuscript history.

University of Oxford, Faculty of English. ‘Langland: The Vision of Piers Plowman’. An accessible introduction to the poem, giving its historical setting and discussing its alliterative form.

Benson, Larry D., general editor, The Riverside Chaucer, 3^rd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1987. This is the standard scholarly edition which is the basis for the Middle English texts on Harvard’s Chaucer website.

Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website. Middle English texts with a glossary, interlinear translations and pronunciation materials for The Canterbury Tales.

Coleman, Joyce. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, Cambridge University Press, 1996. A major study of reading aloud and communal listening in late medieval literary culture.

John Hopkins University,‘Chaucer Aloud’.Recordings of Chaucer’s Middle English, including the opening of the General Prologue

Can one authentic text support learners from A2 to C1 without being simplified?

This resource pack uses the sea shanty “Leave Her, Johnny,” published by Cecil Sharp in 1914, to demonstrate the English Bridge principle of one authentic text, multiple pathways. The historical text remains intact; the scaffolding, tasks and expected thinking change with the learners’ level.

The pack contains:

• Three 60-minute teaching pathways for A2, B2 and C1 learners

• The shared authentic text and teacher text notes

• Detailed teacher plans

• Printable student tasks

• Answer guidance

• Support for presenting the shanty without a commercial recording

The materials are suitable for general TESOL classes, including IELTS and pre-IELTS pathways.

Paid subscribers can download the complete PDF below.

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Education doesn’t begin when your child first walks into a classroom. Long before their first day at school, children have learned a huge amount at home, such as how to speak, feed themselves, and how to walk, run, balance and coordinate their hands and eyes. They have also begun to learn what knowledge is, how you learn and whether it is enjoyable, something to be shared with the people around them, and if learning something new is valued and rewarded.

Developing a culture of learning in your home begins with learning and teaching together in the family. It includes a collection of books, and children need their own reading, and activity books on their own little bookcase. It is also important that a child sees adults in the household reading, so that they see it is something people choose to do in daily life. Reading is not just something you do at school because you are a child.

Books can become a birthday, Christmas or Eid treat for your child, and going to the local library or Little Free Library can be a fun outing. Check whether your local library or bookshop offers story readings or other bookish activities, especially during the long school holidays.

Being read to is a pleasure that doesn’t need to end when the child has learned to read independently. I was once a boarding school housemistress, and my year seven and eight girls loved have a book read to them, one chapter every evening at the end of the day. The older girls would also ask me to read something to them, and I asked them to choose what they wanted. It was often a poem, and surprisingly they chose poetry in their exam anthologies more often than not.

The shared attention of reading aloud in a group creates a little community centre on the text. Everyone listens to the same words and enters the same world of the imagination, recreating their personal version of it with other people. The text belongs to the writer and the person reading but also to the group who heard the text read out together. Reading in a family helps to build family cohesion and expresses something about what the family values. This message reaches the children, that the story is worth out time, this experience of sharing a test is valuable. For centuries, families prayed and read the Bible together, and the intention was to build cohesion around a set of beliefs.

Long before poetry was written down and studied off the page in school, it was spoken, recited, or sung. Poetry asks us to hear its music through the human voice. It isn’t an academic exercise to read a poem or nursery rhyme at bedtime, it is rather a return to one of the most ancient traditions of sharing a text.

Learning in the home, though, is not only about books. A parent may decide to make a loaf of bread and ask the children to help. They take out grandma’s old notebook, with her handwritten recipes handed down by her own mother. As they make the bread, the parent shows the children how to weigh and measure the ingredients and this applies principles they are learning in maths. Then the parent mixes the ingredients and shows the children how the dough should look and feel, whether to add more flour or more water, and then they can all have a try at kneading the dough with clean hands. This is a sensory, practical experience. Once the dough is in the tin, the children can peep under the tea towel to see how it’s rising, and learn when it’s risen enough. Older children might start a recipe book of their own, so the recipes are kept and passed on to another generation as it always has been.

This passing down of family knowledge is beautiful lesson to teach a child, and it helps preserve cultural traditions and family customs. Children learn that the older members of their family have valuable skills and knowledge and it shows them that there are more ways of learning than consulting a reference book or the internet.

Another valuable lesson can come from seeing a parent repair or restore a nice old piece of wooden furniture they’ve inherited or bought or maybe found discarded. The child sees that things can be given a new purpose, and you don’t have to keep throwing things out and buying new ones. Furthermore, they see things go wrong with the process, and watch the parent start again or try a different technique until they achieve what they wanted to do. When the child learns at school about sustainability and recycling and repurposing, they have a lived experience to link those ideas back to.

Education is not just spelling, maths or science, confined to subjects, classrooms and examinations. The important part of it comes from learning how to make and mend things needed for everyday life, grow flowers or vegetables for the kitchen, look after the furniture and other items in the home and repair them when necessary. Learning how a family remembers its own special home baking recipes, how the household runs on a daily basis and what chores are necessary, and experiencing how knowledge is shared from one family member to another – all of these things are educational experiences.

Turning to formal education, it is very valuable to take language learning from the child’s classroom and bring it into their ordinary life. Whether the child is learning English as a Second Language or studying Spanish or French as a foreign language, parents can make learning languages playful and useful.

If you go on holiday to Spain or maybe Mexico, encourage your child to say hello to the people they are in contact with, such as waiters or other children in the playground. Encourage them to ask for their own ice cream in a shop and invite them to look at the menu in restaurants and see whether they can understand and identify what they want. If the parents don’t speak the language, the child might become the family expert, helping the parents communicate. This is a big confidence boost for them, and it is motivating as they see the use of what they are studying at school.

Continue the learning experience at home – make a Christmas card saying Joyeux Noel with a nice picture, decorate a birthday cake with ‘feliz cumpleanos’, or send a text message to someone they know who speaks the foreign language, such as another child in their class or even the teacher. A scrapbook about the countries and communities which speak the language they’re learning is interesting. My GCSE French students were surprised to learn how many countries (apart from France) use the language, and it was the door to explore Africa, including countries such as Tunisia and Chad, as well as Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. They had a great time collecting information for ‘mood boards’ for the classroom and this is easy with internet access and a colour printer. Older children taking exams might enjoy having a nice notebook and keeping a journal with new words, sentences they’ve made up with them, pictures they’ve drawn and labelled. They can use the language imperfectly in private without being corrected for every mistake. It’s fun, and a natural way to use what they’re learning at school.

The content of the home education will vary between families, and may rely on ethnicity, religious community or level of affluence. What matters is that children see knowledge being used, valued and shared in their family. It isn’t healthy for children to see adults presenting themselves as knowing everything. On the contrary, it is useful for a child to see their parent looking things up, asking a question, learning a new skill and practising until they can do it well. They learn that we all need to keep learning, and to do so we have to find resources in books, online or by asking other people.

Seeing adults learning formally underlines the message that education is a lifelong process, so a parent doing continuing professional development online for their job, or taking a degree and going to lectures and exams is a positive thing for children to see. The setting may be different from the child’s school but they see that education isn’t a stage that adults have completed. Everyone continues to develop as well as to share their knowledge and skills.

Governments talk about developing a learning society, and this is how we achieve it, simply in normal family life. Education can be formal or informal, the aim might be a new vocational qualification or a loaf of homemade bread. Both are part of the culture of learning and both make curiosity, humility and continued personal growth a lifelong process.

Above all, the culture of learning at home should be fun, because children work hard at school and we don’t need to turn their bedroom into another classroom! Reading, writing a poem for their sister’s birthday, baking a cake, keeping a journal are play in their own right, and for a child to play is to learn. I think this is actually a lesson for adults too – we need to remember how to have fun, and let ourselves absorb new things and keep growing.

Eliot and Pound were among the founders of modernism in English poetry, and they argued that traditional poetic forms and themes could no longer express the experience of the modern world. They sought new forms and ways of expressing ideas and feelings and they opened the door to a rich period of experiment and innovation. Modernist texts are known for their experimentation with language, their original use of form and for the difficulty in interpreting their content.

As well as being important writers themselves, Eliot and Pound played an significant part in promoting the work other writers such as James Joyce and Robert Frost. They also worked together and Pound edited Eliot’s great poem ‘The Wasteland’.

This is why I want to consider ‘Francesca’ and ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ poems side by side, as they both show us women at a critical moment in their lives. Looking at them together enables the reader to see what the two poems share and how they differ, deepening our understanding of both poems and their writers.

Francesca opens with a two-line short story of a woman coming indoors holding flowers, a snapshot from the past. He switches to the present tense to comment on how he now sees her, emerging from a group of people who are talking about her although we don’t know why. His reaction at seeing her ‘in ordinary places’ such as a party after meeting her ‘among primal things’ is ‘anger’. He associates her with nature, with holding flowers and coming ‘in out of the night’ and he wants to return to the moment he describes in the first two lines.

His desire is to escape from ‘ordinary places’ where people gossip about Francesca, and to forget the ‘turmoil’ and ‘confusion’ as ‘cool waves’ bring calm and the world is ‘swept away’ like the dead leaves and seedheads of autumn. He believes this will enable him to ‘find you again’.

In ‘Francesca’, Pound is exploring the poetic aesthetics which would become the Imagist movement, officially announced to the world in 1912. Imagism was to become a foundation idea of modernism, as well as being a thread within the movement which sought to replace Victorian and Romantic excess with economy, and formalism with ‘new cadences’.

‘Francesca’ is a brief, spare poem which nonetheless conveys strong emotion, anger and a longing to restore the past. The feelings of the narrator are clear although the scenes are not described in detail, reflecting his imagist ideas. The poem captures a few moments of Francesca’s life and contrasts her lone figure holding flowers with her vibrant social persona, as well as making clear the narrator’s wish to have her to himself.

The narrator’s jealousy and possessiveness make it clear that this is a love poem although it is not romantic. Sensuality is expressed by the phrase ‘primal things’ and the one-word final line makes clear the emotion contained in the poem. ‘Alone’ is the way the narrator wishes to find Francesca. He clearly wishes to get her back in his life, and to retrieve the relationship he believes they once had, but the reader is left questioning whether this is indeed possible or likely.

La Figlia Che Piange’ opens with a Classical reference and its tone is cool and distant. To explain the Classical reference, there is a scene in the Aeneid of Virgil where the goddess Venus, disguised as a young girl, asks Aeneas whether he has seen her sister. He replies, ‘Oh Maiden, how may I name you?’. The Aeneid is a Latin text and Eliot quotes Aeneas’s reply in the first line of his poem whose title is in the Italian language - ‘The Girl who is Weeping’. Read together these two lines sum up the poem’s theme of emotional memories and introduce a stylistic device much used by Eliot.

Using foreign languages, quoting from foreign texts, making Classical and Biblical references and using a variety of cultural contexts are all features of Eliot’s poetry and it adds to the complexity and to the challenge of interpreting and understanding his work.

The first stanza reads like the instructions of a stage or even a film director to an actress. The poet is drawing a beautiful scene for the reader, as the unnamed girl stands at the top of the garden steps and leans on an urn in the sunlight. She looks serene and composed at first sight so it is a surprise to see her hold her flowers tightly to her and then throw them away, feeling resentful and unhappy. The meaning of the title is made clear – something has just occurred to upset the girl, and she cannot hold onto her composure any longer.

The second stanza switches from the use of the second person, which has given us the sense of stage management, with a series of instructions to the weeping girl. The poet now muses over the scene he has created and gives us his feelings about it. He reflects that the scene is just the way it needed to be – ‘So I would have had him leave,/So I would have had her stand and grieve’.

At the same time, he acknowledges the girl’s pain, seeing that she is ‘torn and bruised’ as well as grieving over the man who has deserted her. He concludes that what was required was a ‘way incomparably light and deft’ as well as ‘simple and faithless.’ But who needed this light touch, and this faithlessness? The girl? Her ex-lover? Or the narrator? The question leads me to suggest that it is the narrator/poet who is setting out what his poem needs, and that the real theme of this piece is the poet’s own method. He appears to see the scene he has created as artistic requirements to allow him to write his poem, and there is no emotional or empathy here.

The stanza leaves open the question of the ex-lover’s identity – is he the poet, and is he reflecting on the end of a relationship from a safe distance? Is the poem recalling the end of love, scented with nostalgia and self-justification for the outcome? Is the poet seeking a way of retrieving his lost love or is he trying to achieve understanding and emotional closure?

The third stanza opens by ending the scene as ‘she turned away’ and now the summer feels over. The poet cannot let go of the scene which ‘compelled my imagination’ and he reflects how two lovers ‘should have been together’. He asks whether he has missed or misunderstood their relationship, ‘lost a gesture and a pose’. The picture of the girl with ‘her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers’ is one which still occupies his thoughts both at ‘troubled midnight’ and at the ‘noon’s repose’.

The poem combines the themes of pain and beauty. It contains memorable images ‘weave, weave the sunlight in your hair’ and the scene is a garden in flower at high summer. However, there is no detailed description of the flowers, the girl or the lover. The contextualization is brief, ‘a garden urn’ and the two references to the weeping girl holding flowers. Her emotions are demonstrated through her gesture in throwing away the flowers and turning away, but the reason for her resentment and grief is not made clear – there is no back story, just the description of the moment in the garden.

What is clear is that the narrator is captivated by the girl and by the garden scene, and that he cannot get them out of his mind. The reader is left with the girl’s emotions and the detached but nostalgic state of mind of the poet . We remain with the questions the poem has given rise to about the girl and the reason why she is weeping.

Both poems deal with the reactions of a male narrator to a woman holding flowers, and both are written by modernist poets. The differences in how the theme is dealt with, and the emotions evoked in the reader by the poems, are significant. The first poem ends with a hope that the poet can recapture the attention of Francesca and regain the magic of their relationship if only he can get her alone. The second poem leaves us with regret and nostalgia for the moment in the garden, but it is clearly a story of a scene which is past and gone without the possibility of recapturing or recalling it except in memory.

What both poems have in common is that love is seen as destructive. It fails and seems doomed to fail, leaving behind the memory of beautiful moments followed by continuing pain and confusion, as well as the longing to retrieve the lost lover. Both poets seek ways of resolving their dilemmas, but the reader is left feeling that neither of them will find resolution and be able to revive the love they have lost.

This essay was written with Hayyan Ramez Al Ali MA, who does not write on Substack. He is a teacher of English.

The illustration for the article is made by Substack’s own AI

The number of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers looking to relocate to the Gulf or the United Kingdom is at record levels. Hospitals in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha and across the NHS are actively recruiting doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals from around the world. For most of them, the clinical qualifications are already in place. The obstacle that delays them is a language certificate that proves they have an adequate level of English for their job.

Regulators do not, as a rule, demand one specific test. What they demand is proof of English at the level a clinician needs to practise safely.

1. In the UK, both the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council accept the OET or IELTS.

2. Across the Gulf, the licensing authorities — the DHA and DoH in the UAE, the SCFHS in Saudi Arabia, the QCHP in Qatar and their counterparts in Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait — treat English proficiency as one component of licensure, sitting alongside primary-source document verification and the authority’s own qualifying examination.

So the real question is not whether you need the OET or IELTS in particular. It is which test gives you the fastest, safest route to the score your regulator wants — and for a growing majority of healthcare professionals, that answer is the OET.

The IELTS Academic module asks a nurse or doctor to write an essay on climate change or urban architecture. The OET asks the same nurse or doctor to write a referral letter for a patient with pneumonia. One of these tasks resembles the job they are trained for and want to do, whereas the other does not. Studying for one will help build the English language skills the candidate needs at work every day and the other builds English for academic study.

That is the whole design principle of the OET. All four sub-tests — Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking — are built from clinical scenarios. The Speaking test is a patient consultation role-play, and the Writing test is a referral or discharge letter. The reading and listening materials are drawn from real healthcare contexts. For a working clinician, the vocabulary and the situations are already familiar, which is precisely why so many candidates find it a more attainable route to the same threshold.

It matters for scoring, too. The UK’s NMC allows a candidate to combine results and accepts a slightly lower Writing grade where the other three sub-tests are strong — a concession that has rescued many otherwise-qualified nurses who kept missing the IELTS Writing band by half a point.

Because the OET is a targeted exam in “medical” English, it does not mean it is “easy.” Clinicians who speak excellent English at the bedside and still underperform on the OET for consistent reasons:

1. Writing is where most referrals go wrong. The OET letter is not a free composition. It is a professional document assessed on how well you select relevant information, organise it logically, and pitch it to the reader — a specialist, a GP, a community nurse. Candidates lose marks by transcribing the case notes wholesale, mismanaging the purpose of the letter, or misjudging register. Clinical accuracy does not compensate for a letter that buries the reason for referral in paragraph four. This is where a tutor who understands medical terminology and how referrals work in a clinical environment is valuable.

2. Speaking rewards structure, communication and listening with understanding, not fluency alone. Confident speakers often talk past the assessment criteria. The role-play tests whether you can explain, reassure, check understanding and manage a real interaction with a patient — not whether you can speak quickly.

3. Listening and Reading move at clinical pace and test precise comprehension. Skimming, which serves people well in everyday reading, costs marks here. You need to read the text carefully and listen to the recording with attention to detail.

All of these challenges can be overcome, but they are why generic English tutoring, or self-study from free samples, so often produces a near-miss — a Grade C where a Grade B was needed — and a repeat exam fee, not to mention delays in getting into a post and starting work. This can be costly in terms of cash, but more importantly in maybe missing career opportunities.

The professionals affected are far broader than the headline roles. Radiographers, medical laboratory scientists, pharmacists, dentists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dietitians and other allied health practitioners all face the same proficiency requirement when they apply to work in the Gulf or the UK.

For recruitment agencies and healthcare employers, the language step is often the limiting factor in a placement and this can mean loss or delays in commissions and fees from employers. A candidate who is otherwise ready but stuck on a Writing sub-test is a delayed start date, a held or even lost vacancy, and a frustrated client. Preparation that is targeted to the profession and the regulator’s exact threshold is the difference between a placement that completes and one that stalls.

I have spent many years teaching English to professionals, and I work at exactly this intersection where healthcare communication and high-stakes English examinations meet. What sets my preparation apart is not only the language side. Unlike most English tutors, I have trained formally in the clinical subjects themselves — anatomy and physiology, medical terminology, and hands-on practice in areas ranging from laser therapy and aesthetics to foot health. So when I read a candidate’s referral letter, I am reading it as someone who understands the anatomy it describes and the terminology it uses, not only the grammar it is written in. I know how the environment operates and what it is like to work there.

That matters more than it might sound. It means I can tell whether a discharge summary is clinically coherent, whether a Speaking role-play reflects how a consultation actually unfolds, and — crucially — where a candidate’s English is getting in the way of sound clinical thinking that is already there.

A general English teacher can correct the sentence. Far fewer can see that the referral has omitted the one detail the receiving specialist actually needed. I am a qualified TESOL teacher with a knowledge of anatomy and physiology and medical terminology and I know how healthcare works. That combination is rare, and I have also studied Arabic and have experience in the Middle East. This is why I am unusually well placed to prepare clinicians for a medical exam rather than a general one, and it is why I am the perfect choice for a clinician wanting to work in the GCC countries.

If you are a clinician planning a move, or an agency placing staff in the GCC countries or in the NHS in Britain, my advice is simple. Choose the test that matches the job, prepare against the specific criteria your regulator publishes, and treat the language exam as the professional skill it is — not an afterthought to be cleared the week before you fly.

If you have sat the OET or IELTS — or you are weighing up which to take — I would be interested to hear your experience. Which did you choose, and knowing what you know now, would you choose it again? And if you are a recruiter, what tends to hold your candidates up? I read every comment.

Sarah Collins — the English Bridge, offering Language Skills for Professionals. IELTS, OET and Medical English for healthcare professionals.

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963), Edgar Lee Masters (1868 – 1950) and Edward Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935) were contemporaries and each wrote a poem about an ageing man. The three poems have a common theme, and each poem has some similarities with the others. However, they are distinctive pieces of writing and the aim of this article is to explore and compare the three poems and to examine the pictures of masculine old age that they present us with.

Robinson’s characters Old Eben Flood and Old Fiddler Jones cope with the isolation of their later years by drinking and partying in their different ways. As the poem ‘Mr Flood’s Party’ opens, Eben is on his way back home carrying a jug of liquor he’s bought in town. He stops on the hill and looks around to make sure he’s on his own: ‘…paused warily./The road was his with not a native near;’ What follows is an extraordinary party scene, with Eben reflecting on the brief time he has left, celebrating the harvest moon with himself, the only friend he has left, and toasting himself.

”Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon

Again, and we may not have many more;

The bird is on the wing, the poet says,

And you and I have said it here before.

Drink to the bird.”

Despite the merrymaking, toasting and the jollity he shows towards himself, Eben evokes sympathy in the reader. He lives alone, in a remote home on the hill, described as a ‘forsaken upland hermitage’ with ‘as much as he should ever know/On earth again of home’. This picture of stark domestic loneliness perhaps explains why Eben stops on the hill under the bright moon to hold his solitary party rather than getting home before he starts drinking.

He appears to feel better connected with his old friends outdoors, looking down on the familiar town. ‘Below him, in the town among the trees,/Where friends of other days had honored him’ although sadly those friends have now gone and he has no one left there to party with. ‘And there was nothing in the town below—/Where strangers would have shut the many doors/That many friends had opened long ago’. The homes of his former friends are now lived in by strangers who don’t know him.

We leave Eben alone and lonely at the end of the poem, his fantasy celebration over and well aware that his life was almost over, and that he would end it alone and lonely. Eben ‘shook his head, and was again alone./There was not much that was ahead of him’. His party is over and now he must face the bleak reality of his final years.

We are left with compassion for Eben in his solitude but he has made a courageous gesture in holding his own party for himself to remember happier, more sociable days. He toasts the old days, ‘auld lang syne’ and enjoys the light of the moon on the hill as he remembers the friends he once had in town. Eben Flood is not defeated because he is aware that the grief and loss and loneliness he experiences is what is happening to him but nonetheless, they are not him, he still is the man he was and he still celebrates his own life.

‘The Hill’ is Edgar Lee Masters’ poem that describes the fate of the people ‘sleeping on the hill’, i.e. in their graves, and this image of the public cemetery contrasts with Eben’s hill, which is a place of privacy lit by the harvest moon where he can safely carouse. Masters lists the names of the sleepers, along with their most salient characteristics, and how they met their deaths. The men include ‘Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,/The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter’. The way each met his end fits his character:

One passed in a fever,

One was burned in a mine,

One was killed in a brawl,

One died in a jail,

One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife’

Masters continues with a list of the women in the graveyard, their personalities and how their lives ended and goes on to reflect on the elite of the small town whose dead are ‘sleeping on the hill’ together. ‘They brought them dead sons from the war,/And daughters whom life had crushed’. It is clear that position and money is no guarantee of happiness in life, and it seems that the narrator has little hope for the survivors who are not yet sleeping with their forebears.

The final stanza introduces hope in the form of ‘Old Fiddler Jones’ who has spent his life happily enough, enjoying himself regardless of bad weather or adversity and avoiding all responsibility for anyone or anything. ‘Braving the sleet with bared breast,/Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,/Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven’. Jones is now ninety, but far from sinking into a solitary and respectable old age. We find him still clinging onto memories of the irresponsible happiness he has always revelled in. Where is Jones now? ‘Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,/Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,/Of what Abe Lincoln said/One time at Springfield’.

Masters gives us clues, however, that all may not be quite as jolly as it seems in Jones’s old age. He ‘babbles’, boring his audience with rapid, excited accounts of the past which don’t really make sense. He is recounting old fishing barbecues held a long time ago, now only of interest to any other old people who went to them are present. Who now cares about the horse races won by long-dead animals celebrated or lamented by long dead gamblers? And since the lost sons and daughters of the generation of Lincoln lie in the graveyard, is anyone concerned with what Jones thinks about what the great President once said in his home town?

Like Eben Flood, Old Fiddler Jones remembers his happy past among friends in his home town. Unlike Flood, he is not resigned to the truth that he has lost his friends and is now alone in his old age. He goes among people seeking an audience, company and a sense of belonging and tells the same stories he has always told to keep people entertained and happy in his company. He evokes sympathy in the reader at the same time as feeling of embarrassment for him and pity for his desperate attempts to stay in the swim of a lively social life. It is admirable to still be lively as well as alive at ninety, but we are left wanting him to gain self-awareness and dignity.

Robert Frost was a farmer and his old man is a farmer, and you may ask whether he is contemplating his own future? The poem is written in the third person giving no name, only the farmer’s pronouns.

As the poem opens, the farmer is alone at home. Unlike Flood and Jones he neither imagines nor seeks human company, although nature is there and is concerned about him. ‘All out of doors looked darkly in at him/Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,/That gathers on the pane in empty rooms’. The farmer is aware of this concern from the natural world and appears to be grateful for it:

He consigned to the moon,—such as she was,

So late-arising,—to the broken moon

As better than the sun in any case

For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,

His icicles along the wall to keep’

He trusts the moon will care for his home, his shelter from the cold winter night. He is both sheltering from the natural world, the weather, the stars, the frost and snow, and protected by it.

Whilst the ‘out of doors’ looks in on the farmer, he doesn’t look out at the scene outside his window or enjoy the moonlight and the icy beauty of nature. He is holding a lamp, and its artificial light prevents him from seeing beyond the icy panes just as ‘What kept him from remembering what it was/That brought him to that creaking room was age’.

He has been looking for something, ‘clomping there’ and ‘clomping’ off, making a noise which intimidates the night-time outside, ‘Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar/Of trees and crack of branches, common things, /But nothing so like beating on a box’. The farmer is not enlightening the outside world, despite the bright lamp he carries. Even to himself he is only ‘a quiet light’, wrapped up in his own concerns and leaving his home to the care of nature. Nature, on the other hand, is interactive and lively.

The farmer sits down quietly beside the stove and falls asleep, woken only by the sound of a shifting log, but then settling down again. Frost observes that one old man can’t make a house feel fully tenanted and occupied, and he can’t impose his presence on the countryside around him either.

However, Frost leaves us with the comment that ‘if he can/It’s thus he does it of a winter night’. Living in his farmhouse, surrounded by the wintry landscape, the farmer dispels darkness, his lack of any real occupation and his fear of the winter weather outside by inventing errands that he forgets, carrying a light so he doesn’t see the darkness and finally he settling to sleep by the bright warmth of the stove. He is sheltering from the natural world and has found a place of warmth and security in his home.

The three men all deal with being alone in different ways – Flood is alone and finds relief in inventing company and wellbeing until the fantasy fades, leaving him solitary in the moonlight on a lonely hilltop. Jones, by contrast, continues to seek out human company babbling his old tales and trying desperately to avoid becoming solitary. The farmer is alone and capable of reconciling himself to his situation, trusting to the moon that represents nature to look after his home and finding a cosy spot indoors where he can sleep safely.

The three men have different personalities but they face the same predicament of being alone having survived the friends of their own generation, and perhaps their wives or domestic companions as well. How they deal with the situation they face depends on the type of men they are, how their lives have been lived.

Flood lives in a lonely rural house, high up on the hill above the town and he avoids going home to drink there. We don’t hear of Jones having a home at all, and it is unlikely that he’s ever spent much time at home anyway – he’s more likely always to have been found in a bar, at a horse race or a political meeting. He wants people around him, an audience.

The farmer, like Flood, lives in an isolated spot, a farmhouse in a winter landscape. He doesn’t go out, and it isn’t clear what he searching for in his home. He appears to be content to be alone provided he has light and warmth and can shelter from the night outside. He neither invents human company nor seeks it because he has nature as his companion and trusts it to protect and offer him companionship.

Three great American poets face the idea of old age in their own way, and Frost continues his relationship with nature - interactive, ambivalent but in its own way protective in this poem.

This essay was written in collaboration with Hayyan Ramez Al Ali, who does not write on Substack. My acknowledgments for his contribution.

This is an example of how teachers can apply the principles of differentiation to using a poem with learners of mixed levels in the same class, or to using the text with classes at different levels.

Poetry is often not used with ESOL learners, or it is kept for advanced levels. However, using authentic texts which are memorable is rewarding for learners of all levels, and it is motivating for the beginners to achieve reading and working with a real text written for native speakers.

I have selected “Valentine” by Carol Ann Duffy, published in her collection Mean Time, 1993. The poem has just 23 lines and it uses basic level vocabulary – onion, paper, moon, ring, knife, kiss, tears. So it is accessible for your A2 students but it can also hold a C1 class for an hour.

This PDF will show you three lesson plans for your different levels – remember to observe the copyright rules and offer your students a link to an online text or read it aloud in class. You can use the poem from the anthology (or another collection of the poet’s work) but check your rights to photocopy from books for educational purposes before doing so as it varies from country to country.

Read more

AI can generate worksheets, adapt texts, write discussion questions, and create vocabulary activities to use with everything you plan to teach. It is even good at suggesting homework tasks.

AI can do a lot of the work that used to take me a whole evening in minutes, and all I need to do is read through it, tweak it, and print it out!

When I was a teacher trainee, lesson planning was an art form we spent hours perfecting, usually in our teacher’s room after dinner! I still remember filling in the Lesson Plan forms by hand, squeezing my looping handwriting into the little boxes, desperately searching in Lever Arch files and textbooks for resources to photocopy, making up games and cutting and sticking bits of card and pictures from magazines! Twenty trainees, working feverishly, too desperate to chat or interact. I can still smell the glue, old paper and newsprint!

Today I could recreate those lessons and identify textbook resources with AI in under a minute. But it would be wrong to conclude that those evenings were a waste of time! I learned to identify what the lesson was for, what difficulties my group of learners might encounter with the structure, search for information on how to teach the vocabulary and grammar and seek out the resources I was going to use. I learned that teaching requires care and that teachers have to think about the students in front of them in that lesson. Along the way, my own understanding of the English language grew hugely.

I still think that Cert TESOL and CTEFLA students should go through the process of planning a lesson themselves from scratch, learning how to identify and write aims and objectives, sequence activities, produce effective materials, learn some warmer activities, and how to pivot the lesson if the learners are having difficulties or they are too hot or too bored to participate. These are the day to day, technical skills of teaching.

If AI can help with the mechanics of teaching once we are qualified and working and need to speed up our work in order to achieve some kind of work-life balance and avoid burnout, what becomes the real work of the teacher?

Over the past year, the best conversations I’ve had with AI haven’t been about producing lesson plans or even resources, but rather about exploring ideas. I don’t ask AI to write for me, but I dictate my ideas and ask it to question me, help me see patterns, challenge my assumptions and notice where I’m contradicting myself.

It helps me find the words for ideas I half understood and along the way it has made me reflect on how we should be helping new English teachers to find their feet in the classroom. Lesson planning skills are still key, and every teacher should experience planning lessons from first principles because that is how we learn to think as a teacher. The post-AI English teacher will still need to understand language – linguistics, phonetics, structure, vocabulary, stress and intonation, the building blocks of communication. However, AI will streamline administration so the hours spent generating attendance and progress reports will be far shorter, and AI can help us craft a good lesson plan and save us hours with better results at the end of the process.

Increasingly, the value of the classroom teacher will be seen in qualities that AI cannot generate. The ability to create trust in a classroom, be that one to one or with a group of learners of different ages and nationalities is a teaching skill. Building a cohesive group of well-motivated learners is a human skill, not something AI can replace. The sensitivity to the learner who is quietly losing confidence, sitting at the back or in the corner is something AI cannot offer. Language learning is a way of achieving human communication, and it happens best with human guidance and human interaction. This is the value we bring to our students.

Behind the scenes, teachers will have the mental space to work on themselves to become more satisfied, more effective professionals who can progress in their work. All teachers make notes on their lesson plan, reflecting on what worked and what needs to be improved. They note where the lesson plan had to be adapted, and how they achieved that. These are not ‘soft skills’, they are the heart of what being a teacher means and AI is giving us an unexpected and, so far, an undervalued opportunity to develop them in ourselves more fully and to help newly qualified teachers to grow.

For decades the focus in TESOL and teaching English for IGCSE has been on producing teaching materials and doing the paperwork required by education managers. We had no alternative to spending hours planning lessons and writing reports. This is no longer the case and perhaps the time we’ve saved can be spent doing more important things for our learners.

The question I am reflecting on now is how to find ways that AI can help me become a better communicator, with deeper thinking, a better understanding of my learners, and a wiser teacher. My chats with different AI agents have helped me identify what they can’t do and what is unique to me as a human being and as a real, in person classroom teacher. They know their own limitations, and, ironically, they know the strengths of the classroom teacher.

I see a genuine fear in chat rooms and discussions online as well as amongst teachers that we are replaceable with AI, that our profession is fragile and under threat. It is seen in the renaming of teaching as something else – recruiters say they want a language coach, a language specialist or a business language facilitator! This is a myth, and it is simply not going to happen that I will be replaced in my classes with an AI, not in my opinion and interestingly enough not in the opinion of my AI agents.

I would say that AI will never remove the need for pedagogical thought, but rather that it raises the level of that thinking because it leaves the teacher with the energy to focus on it by lightening the everyday load of basic tasks.

I would also argue that the better you understand teaching, the better you will work with AI. This means that the traditionally taught skills of the TESOL certificate course remain valuable and will always be the foundation of the professional teacher’s training. To write a decent prompt for AI, you have to know what to ask for and writing an AI skill requires insight into the process you are asking it to carry out. You can’t do it well unless you have carried out the process yourself and found all the pitfalls and tangles!

It is time to think about how we will train new teachers to use AI to enhance their professionalism and develop their skills. I don’t have the answers, but I think it is time to put aside the anxieties and focus on the future we will have with AI as a partner. It is here, and in practice we have no choice but to adapt and grow with it.

Yes, I used the Substack image generation tool to make my illustration. It seemed to fit well here.

At this time of high summer, the leaves on the trees have darkened and the heat has yellowed some of them so that they are falling prematurely. Whenever I am in the garden, I find myself either sweeping the fallen leaves away or sitting in the shade under a leafy tree. I choose walks in woodland to stay cool, and enjoy the fall of light and shadow, and the refreshing sound of the wind as it rustles the leaves.

It feels like a good time of year to think about leaves in poetry, and so two authors from different periods were chosen, Emily Bronte because I live in Haworth and walk on the same moorland, and Robert Frost because he is so deeply engaged with nature in his work.

The first piece chosen was from Emily Bronte’s Unpublished Poems, numbered simply XXV, and Clement Shorter’s anthology was the source of the text. Robert Frost’s poem ‘Leaf Treader’ and ‘Bereft’ were picked because both of these poems use leaves as important imagery.

Any essay answers a question and the one asked here is what is the difference between the way a nineteenth century poet writes about leaves and the things a modernist poet has to say about them?

Emily Bronte’s Unpublished Poems were included in Clement Shorter’s 1908 edition of ‘The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte’. She died on 19 December 1848 at the age of 30, at her home in the Parsonage in Haworth, now a museum so this group of poems was published many years after her death.

In his introduction, Shorter explains that the Unpublished Poems were numerous and came to form the larger part of his collection. They were contained in note-books and written by hand. Charlotte Bronte had tenderly handled the notebooks after both Emily and Anne had died, and made her Selection to publish. Shorter explains that ‘these little note-books were lent to me by Mr Nicholls, her husband some forth years afterwards with permission to publish whatever I liked from them’. (Mr Nicholls was Charlotte’s husband and the literary heritage of the three sisters finally rested in his hands.)

Frost’s poem ‘A Leaf Treader’ was first published in ‘A Further Range’ in 1936 and ‘Bereft’ is a poem from the ‘New Hampshire’ collection published in 1923.

Frost interacts with the leaves rather than writing about them as a detached observer of natural beauty and the movement of the seasons, and ‘A Leaf Treader’ opens with a description the narrator makes of trampling autumn leaves underfoot. He seems to feel threatened by the leaves, being ‘autumn-tired’ and ‘too fierce from fear’ and he is relieved that he has ‘safely trodden underfoot’ this year’s fallen leaves. However, it is not only autumn leaves that Frost finds threatening. ‘All summer long I heard them threatening under their breath’ and then when they fall in autumn, they tap his eyelids and touch his lips, issuing an ‘invitation to grief’ which he rejects. He reflects that he has no need to follow them to death - ‘no reason I had to go because they had to go’. He admonishes himself, however, to get on with dealing with the season of snow.

Since it is leaves in general which threaten Frost, what is it about leaves which is intimidating? Clearly, leaves symbolise something other and perhaps more than themselves.

The poem moves from the summertime when the leaves are ‘overhead, more lifted up than I’ to the autumn when they ‘come to their final place in earth’, a phrase which recalls the idea of the tomb, the final resting place. Frost explains that the leaves ‘seemed with a will to carry me with them to death’. The passing of time and our eventual death are the subject of the poem and this process is inexorable. Once the task of ensuring the different coloured and shaped leaves have been ‘trodden on and mired’, the narrator turns to his wintertime job which is to ‘keep on top of’ the snow, and this involves lifting his knees so he can tread that down too.

The repetitive rhythm of the seasons and their tasks is underlined with the phrase that ends the first stanza and is repeated in the final line of the poem ‘another year’, ‘another year of snow’. the repetition invokes a sense of routine, the passing of one year in the same way as the last one and the next one.

In Frost’s work ‘Bereft’, the leaves are falling and lying on the porch in the autumn, and ‘Summer was past and day was past’. Frost loves personification of nature, and in this poem the wind takes an interest in the poet’s activities. ‘What would it take my standing there for…?’ he asks. It is not the wind that moves the leaves around on the porch as they appear to be like snakes, and aggressive. They ‘got up in a coil and hissed,/Blindly struck at my knee but missed’. The narrator has had a lucky escape but the feeling of danger persists because there is ‘something sinister in the tone’ of the voices which reveal the secret of his solitude at home and in life.

Moving backwards to the Victorian period, and to a poet some critics define as Romantic, Emily Bronte’s ‘Observation of Leaves, November 23, 1839’ reflects on the autumn weather and the tough fate of leaves in the Pennine village she lives in.

‘The wind was rough which tore
That leaf from its parent tree;
The fate was cruel which bore
The withering corpse to me.

We wander and we have no rest,
It is a dreary way.
what shadow is it
That ever hovers before my eyes?
It has a brow of ghostly whiteness’

Being orphaned and meeting the cruel fate of early death are ideas which echo the lived experience of Emily Bronte, who lost her mother when she was just three years old and two of her older sisters when she was six. Maria and Elizabeth Bronte both died within three months of one another in the early months of 1825 at the ages of 11 and 10 years old. They had been sent to a harsh boarding school for the daughters of poor clergy and caught tuberculosis there.

It is tempting to see the lives of her sisters as tender leaves torn by the wind of duty and the need to get an education so they could be governesses. The fate of tuberculosis did indeed bring each of the two girls home as a ‘withering corpse’ and the ‘brow of ghostly whiteness’ is an unsurprising image to come to Emily’s mind as she thinks of her childhood losses.

Tragic as the fates of the Bronte children were, they were not unusual in Victorian England and indeed the life expectancy in Haworth at the time was as low as 26 with 40% of children dying before the age of six. Emily was writing about her own family, and about a commonly experienced grief found in many other contemporary families. Her writing is expressing her own loss but reaches outward to the reader, who is likely to have experienced similar grief.

Emily is not interacting with the leaf in her poem, although it is carried towards her by the wind or by fate. The mood is distanced and even impersonal - the narrator observes the fate of the leaf, but she doesn’t try to save it.

The mood is set for the weariness of the second stanza, for the aimless and exhausting life which feels like ‘a dreary way’ with no respite. An undefined ‘shadow … ever hovers before my eyes’, and this recalls the spirit entity that we meet in some of Emily Bronte’s other poems. However, in this poem the narrator receives no invitation to accompany the spirit anywhere or to interact with it. It is simply a constant, eerie presence which could be foretelling the coming of winter once the autumn leaves have fallen and rotted away. Read like this, the poem is about the passing of the seasons from autumn to winter, with the fierce and windy Pennine autumn moving into the freezing cold winter and snowfalls that isolate the village even now.

In Bronte’s poem, the leaf first appears as a ‘withering corpse’ and we encounter the ‘ghostly whiteness’ of the second stanza. Unlike Frost, Bronte makes no attempt to defend herself from nature. she neither beats down the slippy autumn leaves on the road, nor attempts to rescue the orphan leaf blown by the rough autumn wind towards her. She doesn’t seem to feel any sense of personal threat or sympathy with the leaf.

The personification of the ‘parent tree’ and ‘withering corpse’ are simple, they are similes rather than symbolic. The narrator is observing the seasons and recreating their mood but there is no sense of interaction between the poet and inimical nature as there is in Frost’s work.

There is a significant difference in the use of imagery about leaves and the passing seasons between Emily Bronte writing in the nineteenth century as a Romantic poet and Robert Frost writing in the twentieth century as one of the modernist poets. Where Bronte contents herself with observing and remains detached, Frost interacts with nature and is caught up in emotions evoked by the threat he feels nature poses to him as an individual.

Note: the photo is of Haworth, West Yorkshire, where I live. It is a back lane behind the Baptist and old Methodist chapels, less than five minutes from Emily Bronte’s lifelong home. I walk there.

Hayyan Ramez Al Ali, MA worked with me on this article. He doesn’t write on Substack.

The poets who made friends and worked in Dymock went on to have international reputations and the work they did in this beautiful landscape was published in individual collections and anthologies of poetry and prose around the world. Notable examples include Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, written about Edward Thomas and his hesitant habits, and Rupert Brooke’s much quoted poem ‘The Soldier’. The writers were searching for an idyll, an English dream, and they captivated their early twentieth century audience with their images of golden moments of beauty and happiness before the world descended into the hell of modern warfare.

The group published a journal called New Numbers, literally working on the kitchen tables in their cottages, with the aim of bringing the style known as Georgian Poetry to the public. These were fresh and original poems written in simple, everyday language and dealing with the affairs of ordinary folk going about their daily business.

The members of the Dymock Poets were Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Edward Thomas, Wilfrid Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie. Their wives and families joined them in village life, and the poet Eleanor Farjeon, a close friend of Edward Thomas, visited for around a month in the summer of 1914.

This article will introduce readers to the poems the members of the group wrote about one another, celebrating friendship between individuals, reflecting on the group as an entity, and lamenting the deaths of Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas in the First World War.

Lascelles Abercrombie ‘R.B.’

This was the title of the elegy written by Abercrombie after Rupert Brooke’s death on 23 April 1915. He died from sepsis on the Aegean island of Skyros whilst on the way to Gallipoli. The poem is Abercrombie’s personal reflection on Brooke’s character and his impact on the group.

The opening words of the poem are ‘Beautiful life!’ and the rest of the poem develops this idea. The poet has a vision of him as ‘the purest fire of life’ which turned all that he encountered in the ‘eager world’ into a ‘flame of burning beauty’. He claimed that Brooke had a secret, that of turning wherever he was into a ‘golden place’ and bringing beauty to his friends. ‘Life knew no way to make life lovelier, none’.

The poem is full of images of light and fire, reflecting its opening vision. Brooke had a ‘glowing mind’ which ‘turned to fire’ the things he read and lived through, and he in turn ‘cast/The light of their transfiguring’ on his own life. His influence ‘gleamed’ on the group, ‘he shone’ and had an ‘angel brightness’.

The end of the poem is abrupt and as shocking as Brooke’s early death must have been to those who knew him. Death is personified and leads him away, indicating a new path which silences his brilliant young poetic voice. ‘I know the way. Behold!’

Wilfred Gibson – ‘To the Memory of Rupert Brooke’

This is a very short poem, just eight cohesive rhyming lines. The first and last lines echo one another, emphasising that Brooke is dead. ‘He’s gone’ is the stark statement of the first line, whilst the last changes tense but leaves the same message of loss. ‘And he was gone’.

The poem expresses the difficulty we have in comprehending loss and grief in the second line, ‘I do not understand’. The writer describes the last moment he shared of Brooke’s life as he turned to wave goodbye as he left to join the army, never to return to his friends.

Gibson’s use of imagery in this poem recalls the Abercrombie’s description of Brooke. At the moment of farewell, ‘a sudden glory shone’ in his eyes as he took leave of a his friend, and the writer was ‘dazzled by a sunset glow’ which seems to reflect the personal qualities of his friend. For Gibson, Brooke was a brilliant young man whose anticipated glorious future remained unfulfilled because of his sudden death.

John Drinkwater, ‘Rupert Brooke (died April 23, 1915)’

The poem opens with the writer’s reflections on the literature he had been reading that day – Euripides, Shakespeare and Wordsworth – along with images which struck him, ‘chimney sweepers’, ‘the nightingales’ lament’ in the ‘Carian trees’, ‘mounting Loughrigg Fell’. At first reading, it is tempting to think he is showing off his reading habits and knowledge! However, the poem is addressed to Rupert Brooke rather than reflecting on him to the reader, and so perhaps Drinkwater is reminding his absent friend of the shared love the two poets had for these authors and their work. The later lines of the poem make it clear that in fact Drinkwater is not demonstrating the depth of his own reading!

In the second stanza, Drinkwater moves immediately to an elegiac mood remarking on the nature of the first stanza - ‘quick thoughts are these; they do not pass’ but add to the overwhelming fact of Brooke’s death ‘such little, casual things’ which are insignificant, ‘noteless levies of the grave’. The poem closes with a rhyming couplet explaining that the poet is grieving his poet friend, but that their ‘immortal fellowship remains, and the implication is that it has been captured in the work they wrote and shared.

This closing thought returns us to the mood of the first stanza, where the ale is ‘freshly brewed’, ‘all timeless deaths in Lycid are renewed,/And basils blossom yet for Isabel’. The literature Drinkwater and Brooke read and talked about lives on in their poetry, the work these young writers created still speaks to us and so whilst ‘my mortality for yours complains’, the voices of poets live on forever.

Drinkwater is also suggesting to us here that, if the great poets were present, they would share his appreciation of Brooke and his work. This makes the poem a true elegy, placing its subject in a group which includes Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and so defining Brooke’s status as a writer amongst his peers.

Wilfrid Gibson, ‘Rupert Brooke (Part III)

This is another poem addressed to Rupert Brooke, not to the reader. This is clear from the opening line. ‘Your eyes rejoiced’ sets the scene for a stanza that celebrates a golden moment of the summer of 1914.

Brooke is looking over ‘a great sunlit field afire/With windy poppies’ whose vibrant red Gibson describes as ‘colour’s ecstasy’. It is interesting that this poem echoes association of Brooke with fire found in the elegies written by Abercrombie and by Gibson.

The poppies are contrasted with the ‘green orchards of that western shire’, placing the scene in Gloucestershire, during that glorious pre-war summer when the Dymock poets lived and worked and developed together as writers. However, poppies are the symbol of remembrance for the world wars, still worn on our lapels in Britain every November, and so this stanza prefigures Brooke’s death, warning us of the tragedy which we know is to come.

Gibson opens his second stanza with the reflection that he had ‘little thought’ of ‘how soon … your soul should wander down the darkling way’ to death. The flowers are now ‘Lethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey’ recalling us to the opium that poppies produce and the effects of the drug on those who take it. Brooke’s eyes are peering into the cloudy gloom, ‘half-glad, half-sad’, as the ‘shrivelling ashen grey’ poppies of the battlefield remind him of the ones that so delighted him the previous summer.

Clearly the suddenness of Brooke’s death in such a far off place shocked the group, and this is reflected in the elegies they wrote for him. They recall a gifted, fiery-bright young man who spread golden happiness among the group, and there is a sense of loss and grief coupled with nostalgia for a time when they were young together, and looking forward to forging their literary careers.

Robert Frost, ‘To E.T.’

Frost and Thomas were very close friends, and this elegy is addressed to its subject, ‘E.T.’. Edward Thomas was killed on 9 April 1917 at the Battle of Arras. For Frost this was doubly tragic as the two had discussed plans to live as neighbours in the United States, and Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ is a gentle satire on Thomas’s lack of decisiveness about which path to take – life in the United States or doing his duty and enlisting to fight. In the end, Thomas volunteered for the Artists Rifles in July 1915, and it is believed that Frost’s poem was the final impetus for this decision.

Frost begins his poem with a domestic scene. He’s lying down taking a nap, reading Thomas’s poems until he falls asleep. ‘I slumbered with your poems on my breast’ before ‘I dropped them half-read through’. The next simile reminds us of the tragedy of Thomas’s death, as the pages fall open ‘like dove wings on a figure on a tomb’.

The second stanza recalls the emotional stages we pass through in our grieving, regretting ‘the chance I missed in life/Through some delay’. He never met Thomas in his new role as the soldier-poet and the next stanza expresses his regret. ‘I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain/Unsaid between us, brother’. Thomas died before the war was won, and so Frost cannot find closure. On hearing of Thomas’s death ‘the war seemed over more for you than me’ and the allied victory inspires ambivalence in Frost. ‘How over, though … If I was not to speak of it to you’. The poem closes with Frost’s sorrow that he won’t ever see Thomas ‘pleased once more with words of mine’.

This poem is deeply evocative of how loss feels, and the regrets we have for things unsaid and for a future we can never share with the dead friend. For Frost, the loss to war of a poet peer to share his words and ideas with is shocking and puzzling. this is a poem about friendship and loss and it expresses the difficulty in moving on from the moment of shock, of the realisation that the shared future the friends had planned will now never come to pass. The poem is an elegy that does not eulogize Thomas as the poems about Brooke do. It is, rather, an immediate and personal expression of grief and loss which speaks to common human experience. It is one of Frost’s great poems, alongside ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the two pieces are best read together, as they reflect each other and the consequences of decisions we make.

Robert Frost, ‘Iris by Night’

Although not published until 1928, Frost himself dates this poem as being written in 1914 before his friend Edward Thomas joined the army and went to his death in the First World War. It describes a magical walk the two poets took together during the months the Dymock Poets were living and working in Gloucestershire.

Frost describes the ‘misty evening’ in the Malvern Hills as ‘we two’ (Thomas and himself) were struggling down a hillside, following ‘the last wet fields and dripping hedges home’. Light dazzles them suddenly as the moon rises and makes a rainbow in the saturated air, ‘a scene/So watery as to seem submarine’. The rainbow first shows itself as an archway ‘a trellis gate, /A very small moon-made prismatic bow … through which to go’. The moment continues to an even more remarkable event, ‘the miracle/That never yet to other two befell’, as the moon-made rainbow ‘lifted from its dewy pediment/Its two mote-swimming many-coloured ends/And gathered them together in a ring’ that circles the two friends, protecting them ‘from all division time or foe can bring/In a relation of elected friends’. The moment is a magical one, two brilliant young poets, working in collaboration in a literary project, ringed by a rainbow forever in our minds.

Frost has the habit of revealing the intention and meaning of a poem in the final two lines, and this is true of this poem. Frost is looking back on that evening, when the two friends felt circled round and safe together in each other’s company. This is a nostalgic reflection, because as Frost has already told us earlier in the poem it was a moment that ‘I alone of us have lived to tell’. sadness and regret mingle with gratitude for the experience the rainbow ‘vouchsafed’ the friends.

Wilfred Gibson, ‘The Golden Room’ (To G.)

Gibson’s wife was Geraldine Townshend, and she had worked at the Poetry Bookshop in London which served as a hub for the poets who were to form the Dymock Group. The couple spent their honeymoon in Dymock, staying at The Gallows, a cottage belonging to the Abercrombies. Gibson and Frost were good friends at this time, and it was Gibson who first suggested that Frost and his family should come down to live in Gloucestershire. He helped them locate a cottage two miles away, and Geraldine wrote to Elinor Frost to say how they ‘absolutely rejoiced’ at the news they were moving in.

This poem was written in 1925, seven years after the end of the war, and it is recalls a pre-war evening gathering of the poets held at The Old Nailshop, the cottage rented by the Gibsons It is addressed to the Dymock Poets as a group, although at the time it was written Brooke and Thomas were dead.

The writer reminds us of the ‘cosy cream-washed living room’ where they all met, giving the guest list in case it had been forgotten. He describes how ‘Robert Frost kept on and on and on,/In his slow New England fashion’, but kept them entertained with ‘shrewd turns and racy quips’ as his normally ‘grave blue eyes’ twinkled with humour. Abercrombie adds a ‘quick flash’ to the conversation, Thomas gives ‘a murmured dry half-heard aside’ and then we hear a ‘clear laughing word’ from Brooke. Then Frost picks up the thread of his ‘ripe and rich philosophy’ again, which ‘poured as clear a stream’ as Gloucester cider.

Thomas reminds the audience that the evening was ‘in July/Of nineteen-fourteen …/Then August brought the war, and scattered us’. This is how we learn what broke up the group and ended the close personal and artistic links between them. ‘Brooke sleeps’ on ‘an Aegean isle’ whilst ‘Thomas lies/’Neath Vimy Ridge’. The survivors carry on but ‘nigh as ruthlessly has life divided/Us who survive’. Abercromie is working in the north of England, and Frost has returned to America to be a farmer. Gibson himself was living in Saundersfoot in Wales at this time, and continued to write, review books and got into broadcasting. He also had a share of the income from Brooke’s copyrighted poems, left in his will as a legacy. This gives the context of the lines ‘far from The Old Nailshop,/We sojourn by the Western Sea’.

Looking back at the evening spent in the good company of the Dymock Poets, Gibson reflects on the value of the time they had at the cottage, ‘All golden in the lamplight, thrilled with golden/Laughter from hearts of friends that summer night’. Once again, we have a repetition of the images of the elegies written for Brooke - the loss of the fiery young poets, and the golden summer that preceded the outbreak of the war.

It all ended so suddenly as the war began, ‘and the shadow may never more be lifted from the hearts/That went through those black years of war, and live’. Gibson was a popular contemporary poet, and these lines may have been part of the reason, as there was a folk memory of the summer of 1914 as sunlit, happy and carefree, the final season of freedom for young people before their lives were disrupted by the outbreak of conflict and the loss of many of their friends.

He offers his generation some comfort in this poem. ‘Whenever men and women gather … on a summer night,/Shall not that lamp rekindle’ and bring back the ‘light and laughter’ of former times. He compares the lamplight to a ‘singing star’ which will ‘burn golden-hearted through oblivion’, leaving us with a sense of connection with lost happy days before the war and a belief that we can regain the positive feelings and contentment that was interrupted by the trauma of war.

Gibson was important in bringing the poets together in Dymock, and as a group they formed important friendships, inspiring one another to write and develop as poets. Frost encouraged Thomas to move from writing prose to trying his hand at verse, Gibson prompted Frost to think about using everyday language and workaday topics in his poetry, and the stimulation provided by the environment in Dymock produced some of our most famous and best loved poetry from the period.

The final poem in my collection here tells us how the rainbow ring was broken as war scattered the group of poets. Dymock was a poetic moment at a critical time in history, but what a moment, and what a legacy it left not only in the poems written at that time but in the formation of important writers notably Robert Frost.

This piece was written in collaboration with Mr Hayyan Ramez al Ali, MA. He does not write on Substack.

It is one of the more consequential decisions of your child’s secondary education, and the majority of parents I speak to did not know there was a choice at all.

Two different qualifications, not two difficulty levels

The choice is between First Language English and English as a Second Language. With Cambridge these are syllabuses 0500 or 0990, and 0510 or 0511. Pearson Edexcel runs a comparable pair — English Language A for first-language-standard candidates, English Language B for learners of English as an additional language. Ask your school which codes your child is entered for; the numbers matter more than the names.

The common assumption is that ESL is the easier version of the same thing. It is not. They are different qualifications testing genuinely different skills.

First Language English assumes a first-language user. It tests close reading of demanding texts, inference, analysis of a writer’s craft, summary under pressure, and extended writing in a range of registers. There is no listening paper and no speaking requirement in the core assessment. It is, essentially, a literacy and analysis qualification.

English as a Second Language is built for learners who study through English but do not speak it at home. It assesses four skills — reading, writing, listening and speaking — with a focus on practical, accurate communication rather than literary analysis. Cambridge describes it as preparation for learners who need to use English confidently in academic and professional settings.

One important update: Cambridge removed tiering from the ESL syllabus for examinations from June 2024. Under the previous arrangement candidates were entered for Core, capped at grade C, or Extended. That cap no longer exists — all candidates now sit the same papers with the full grade range available. If you have been given older advice about Core and Extended for English, it is out of date.

Why children end up in ESL

Almost never because a considered judgement was made about that individual child.

The commonest reasons are structural. A school with a large EAL cohort builds its timetable around ESL because it suits most of the intake. A child arrives mid-way through Key Stage 3 from another system and is placed on the basis of a single placement test taken in their first fortnight, while jet-lagged and friendless. A department is under pressure on results, and ESL produces more reliable grades from EAL students than First Language does.

None of these are scandals. They are ordinary institutional pressures. But none of them is an assessment of what your particular child could achieve with two more years of maturity and the right teaching, and that is the gap parents need to close.

What it actually costs

Here I want to be precise, because there is a lot of scaremongering on this subject and the reality is narrower and more specific than the rumours.

It is not true that ESL is worthless. Many UK universities accept Cambridge IGCSE ESL as evidence of English language competency for admission, just as they accept First Language English. Both are respected international qualifications.

Nor is it a visa shortcut. Neither qualification appears on the UK Visas and Immigration list of Secure English Language Tests, so for immigration purposes an IELTS or equivalent may still be required. Cambridge can issue a Certifying Statement mapping results to CEFR levels if an institution asks for a skills breakdown.

The real costs are these:

Some destinations specify First Language. Recognition is broadly similar but not identical, and the variation clusters exactly where it hurts — competitive universities and humanities courses are the most likely to name First Language English specifically. Requirements also change from year to year. A choice made in Year 9 is being applied to admissions criteria that will not be published for another four years.

The preparation gap is the bigger issue. This is the part almost nobody mentions. ESL does not teach literary analysis, sustained argument, or comparative essay writing, because those are not what it assesses. A student who takes ESL and then chooses A Level English Literature, History, Law, Philosophy or Politics arrives in Year 12 without having written the kind of essay those subjects require. They have not been badly taught. They have been well taught for a different exam.

I see the consequences of this regularly: capable, articulate Year 12 students who are suddenly floundering, and who conclude that they are simply not clever enough for A Level. They are. They are missing two years of a specific skill nobody told them they would need.

And there is the quieter cost. A child who is told at fourteen that they belong in the second-language set may carry that judgement a long way, including into subjects where it is irrelevant.

The questions to ask

If your child is approaching this decision, or is already in an ESL class and you are not sure how they got there, these are worth putting to the school. Politely, in writing, and early.

1. Which syllabus code is my child entered for? Get the number, not the subject name.

2. On what basis was the placement made, and when? A test sat on arrival two years ago is not current evidence.

3. What would my child need to demonstrate to move to First Language, and by when is that possible? Most schools have a switching deadline in Year 10. Find out what it is before it passes.

4. What are they predicted in each? A confident 7 in ESL and a possible 6 in First Language is a genuine dilemma. A confident 8 in ESL is usually a sign the child is in the wrong class.

5. Which A Levels are they considering? If the answer includes any essay subject, the preparation gap matters more than the grade.

The honest summary

For a child who genuinely uses English as an additional language and who is heading towards mathematics, sciences or economics, ESL is a perfectly sound choice and there is no need to fight it.

For a child who is fluent, ambitious, and drawn towards essay subjects, being parked in ESL is a real and avoidable disadvantage — and one that shows up not at IGCSE, where the grade may look fine, but two years later in the sixth form.

The decision is reversible for a limited window. That window is usually Year 10. If you are reading this in September and your child is in Year 10, this is the term to ask.

The English Bridge is a newsletter for parents of British-curriculum students in the Gulf. If you are weighing this decision for your own child and want to talk it through, reply to this email.

One of the most common assumptions in TESOL is that a good English teacher should speak only English in the classroom.

I do normally, but that doesn’t mean my knowledge of other languages is irrelevant.

Quite the opposite.

The more languages I have learned, and the more I have come to understand the languages my students speak, the more I have realised that they give me something invaluable in my work as a language teacher.

Insight.

But insight into what?

Into the patterns of grammar that shape a learner’s English.

Into the rhythms of stress and intonation that make some sounds feel natural and others unexpectedly difficult.

Into the influence of a learner’s first language and why they may produce perfectly logical English that a native speaker would never quite say in that way.

Into the cultural assumptions that travel with every language we speak.

And perhaps most importantly, into what it actually feels like to become a language learner again.

In language teaching we have a name for one of the most powerful influences on learning another language: mother tongue interference.

It’s rather an unfortunate term, because it makes the first language sound like a problem.

It isn’t.

When we acquire our first language, we do so over many years of childhood. Long before we understand what a noun or a verb is, we are absorbing patterns. We listen, imitate, experiment, make mistakes, are gently corrected, and gradually discover how language works. By the time we reach adulthood, those patterns have become so deeply embedded that we hardly notice they are there.

Our first language becomes the template through which we approach every language we learn afterwards.

That is enormously helpful because all human languages share certain universal features. They all allow us to describe the world, ask questions, express feelings and build relationships.

But every language also has its own logic.

So when we begin learning another language, we naturally carry the habits of our first language with us. We don’t make random mistakes.

We make perfectly logical errors.

That’s why I’ve never been entirely comfortable talking about learners’ “errors” or “mistakes”.

More often than not, they aren’t getting language wrong.

They’re applying the rules of one language to another.

Understanding that changes the teacher’s role.

Instead of asking,

“What’s wrong with this sentence?”

we begin to ask a much more interesting question:

“Why does this sentence make perfect sense to the learner?”

Once we understand where the sentence has come from, teaching becomes less about correcting mistakes and more about helping learners understand why they’re making them in the first place.

That understanding didn’t come from a methodology book.

It was built from being a language learner through my teenage years, and then from starting Arabic and Persian at university.

When I began learning Arabic, I expected grammar and vocabulary to be the greatest challenges. Arabic belongs to a very different language family from English. The sentence structure is different. The vocabulary offers very few familiar signposts. Unlike French or Spanish, where English shares many words with its neighbours, Arabic often presents you with entirely unfamiliar sounds and words. I assumed that this would be the hardest part.

I was wrong.

What overwhelmed me wasn’t the grammar.

It was learning to read.

During our first lessons we were introduced to the Arabic alphabet. Very quickly, however, the course moved on. Within a matter of weeks, whole sentences were appearing on the whiteboard while I was still painstakingly identifying individual letters and trying to remember sounds that simply don’t exist in English.

There was another surprise waiting for me.

Nobody had taught me how to write Arabic by hand.

I could copy the neat printed letters from a textbook, but handwriting is a different skill altogether. Just as nobody writes English in Times New Roman when they’re writing the old fashioned way on a bit of paper with a pen, Arabic handwriting has its own scripts that have rhythm and flow easily across the page. I found myself trying to learn not only a new language, but also a completely new way of reading, writing and connecting sounds with symbols.

It was a humbling experience. I was just 18 and I thought I was good at languages, but suddenly I couldn’t cope with this one at all.

And then I had to learn that although Persian uses the same script, it has extra letters because the sounds of the language are different – Persian has a P and a B for example, where Arabic has no letter for P sounds. So just like Latin script, Arabic script adapts itself to different languages that use it. J in Spanish isn’t pronounced like that letter in English, after all!

When I graduated from university, I decided that teaching English was the best way into living and working internationally and started my Cert TESOL. My experiences of learning Arabic and Persian shaped the way I look at learners whose first language uses a different writing system. Whether their language is Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Russian or another script unfamiliar to the Latin alphabet, I know that before they can become confident communicators, they first must cross a bridge that many teachers scarcely notice.

Reading and writing are not automatic or acquired naturally in the same way as spoken language. We learn literacy in our first language, and we are already fluent when we begin at the age of five or so.

Reading and writing learned forms of communication, but they are not acquired, they are learned. All languages read and write, but they read and write in different ways. The TESOL teacher needs to give time for the development of literacy in the new language, and they need to teach literacy skills.

Literacy deserves time and consideration. The teacher needs to think about what skills the learner in front of them needs. If they are going to take an exam like TOEFL or IELTS, they will need to be able to write legibly and with reasonable speed. If they are going to study at an English medium university, they will need reading skills like skimming and scanning. We need to meet our learner where they are and offer them the relevant skills for their English journey.

There is a hidden difficulty that advanced learners sometimes carry with them.

Teachers of advanced English classes preparing for IELTS or TOEFL assume that because the learner can read and speak English well, they have mastered every aspect of the language.

That isn’t always true.

I’ve taught highly proficient learners preparing for IELTS whose first language uses a different writing system—Arabic, Chinese and others—who had never really been taught English handwriting.

They could write excellent essays on a computer.

Give them a pen and an answer booklet, however, and they faced an unexpected challenge.

Writing quickly, legibly and confidently by hand is a skill.

Like every other skill, it needs to be taught.

When I remember my own struggles learning Arabic script, I find it impossible to dismiss this as a minor issue.

Reading, writing, listening and speaking are all communication.

None of them should be taken for granted.

Learning another language taught me something else I could never have learned from a book.

It introduced me to another culture.

Not only through its literature and history, but through the small, everyday details that make up ordinary life: how people greet one another, what they consider polite, how hospitality is offered, how time is understood, and the place that faith occupies in everyday conversation.

When I first arrived in the Arab world, I discovered very quickly that learning a language and learning a culture are inseparable. Every conversation revealed assumptions that were different from my own. Even simple greetings carried meanings that reached far beyond the words themselves. God sits naturally at the centre of everyday Arabic speech—in the way people greet one another, say goodbye or speak about tomorrow. Expressions of faith are woven into ordinary conversation in a way that felt unfamiliar to me, yet entirely natural to those around me.

I had set out to learn a language.

Without realising it, I was learning another way of seeing the world.

That changed me.

The more time I spent in Arab countries, the more aware I became that many of the things I had always assumed were simply “normal” were, in fact, cultural. They weren’t universal truths at all. They were habits and assumptions I had inherited without ever questioning them.

Learning another language does something remarkable.

It doesn’t just introduce you to another culture.

It allows you to see your own culture for the first time.

And, perhaps more importantly, it makes you think about what it means to be human. Every society solves the same fundamental problems—how to welcome a guest, raise children, mourn the dead, celebrate life—but not necessarily in the same way.

That realisation made me less certain of my own assumptions and much more curious about other people’s.

Learning another language taught me something else that no methodology book could ever have taught me.

The kindness of strangers.

Like many language learners, I worried constantly that my mistakes would define me. Every time I opened my mouth, I was acutely aware that my Arabic wasn’t the Arabic of an educated native speaker. I assumed that people would hear my mistakes before they heard what I was trying to say.

I was wrong.

Again and again, people responded not to my imperfect grammar but to my willingness to try. They slowed down, repeated themselves, encouraged me and, more often than not, they gave me the time I needed to find the words.

What humbled me most wasn’t their command of the language I was trying to learn.

It was their generosity.

They reminded me that communication is never the responsibility of one person alone. It is something we build together.

People want to understand one another.

Perfection is rarely the price of that understanding.

When I became a teacher a few years later, I realised that I couldn’t leave those experiences outside the classroom.

They had changed the way I thought about language learning.

When students apologised for making mistakes, I recognised the feeling immediately because I had felt it myself.

When they hesitated before speaking, afraid of saying something incorrectly, I remembered my own hesitation in Arabic.

When they became frustrated because progress seemed painfully slow, I knew exactly what they meant.

Learning Arabic had given me something far more valuable than a degree.

It had given me empathy.

Since then, I’ve found myself listening differently.

When a learner struggles to express an idea, I no longer hear only the English they produce, I hear the language behind it, the habits of thought they bring with them and, sometimes, the uncertainty that comes from wondering whether they will be understood at all.

Every learner brings a story into the classroom, even if we can’t see it yet. Every hesitant learner has reasons for their hesitation. A good teacher doesn’t simply correct it; they try to understand where it comes from.

Today, when a learner tells me they’re afraid of making mistakes, I tell them something I had to learn for myself.

Just communicate.

Languages contain an extraordinary amount of redundancy. We don’t need every article, every verb ending or every preposition to be perfect before communication becomes possible.

If you ask for a cup of tea and somebody brings you one, you’ve communicated successfully.

Accuracy matters.

Of course it does.

But accuracy grows through communication, not before it.

We become confident speakers by speaking.

We all become confident writers by writing.

We become confident communicators by communicating

Learning another language taught me that people are usually kinder than my fears allowed me to believe.

One lesson has stayed with me throughout my career.

The learners who appear most confident are not always the ones who are most at ease.

Some of the greatest anxieties I’ve encountered have belonged to advanced learners.

By the time students reach an advanced level, everyone assumes they are fluent. Their grammar is sophisticated. Their vocabulary is extensive. They can discuss abstract ideas, write academic essays and hold complex conversations.

Yet many of them still feel that they are somehow “not good enough”.

I’ve often wondered why.

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the way we have come to define fluency.

Much communicative language teaching has, quite understandably, placed enormous value on speaking with ease and confidence. We admire the person who can keep a conversation flowing effortlessly, moving from one topic to another with apparent ease.

But fluency isn’t the same as speed.

Some people speak almost as quickly as they think. Others think before they speak.

Those pauses do not necessarily reveal uncertainty in the language.

Sometimes they reveal care.

I’ve watched advanced learners compare themselves with more talkative classmates and conclude that their English must somehow be inferior.

Often, I don’t think that’s what they’re comparing at all.

They are comparing different personalities.

As teachers, we need to be careful not to reward only the quickest voices in the room.

Some learners communicate by thinking aloud.

Others communicate by thinking first.

Both deserve to be heard.

Perhaps the right question isn’t ‘Who speaks most fluently?”

Perhaps it’s “Who communicates most effectively?”

Those are not always the same person.

In initial teacher training, every TESOL teacher learns that communication involves four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

For many years TESOL has placed enormous emphasis on spoken communication, and for many learners that emphasis is entirely appropriate. But not for all of them.

A learner preparing for IELTS to enter university has different needs from a doctor preparing for the Occupational English Test, and different needs again from someone who simply wants enough English to travel with confidence.

Good teaching isn’t about deciding that one skill is inherently more important than another.

It begins by asking a different question:

Who is the learner sitting in front of me?

Learning Arabic taught me that reading and writing are not secondary skills. They are communication. I discovered this because I couldn’t yet read the whiteboard while the teacher had already moved on. That experience has stayed with me whenever I teach learners whose first language uses a different writing system.

That’s why I think needs analysis matters so much. Before we decide how and what to teach, we need to understand what our learners actually need English for.

So, do I think a good English teacher should only speak English?

I no longer think that’s the right question.

Sometimes an English-only classroom is exactly the right choice.

There are other moments when one carefully chosen translation saves five minutes of explanation and allows everyone to move forward.

Good teaching is rarely about rigid rules.

It’s about professional judgement.

The greatest gift learning other languages has given me isn’t the ability to translate.

It’s that I know what it feels like to cross the bridge from one language into another.

I know what it feels like to hesitate before speaking.

To wonder whether people will judge my mistakes.

To struggle with a new writing system.

To discover that most people are kinder than my fears.

And to realise that every learner arrives carrying a language, a culture, a history and a way of making sense of the world.

None of those things are obstacles.

Good language teaching doesn’t begin with grammar.

It begins with understanding the learner.

People sometimes speak about tutoring as though it were something separate from teaching. I have never believed that.

Good tutoring is not simply explaining a difficult topic, completing homework or preparing a student for the next examination. At its best, tutoring is teaching in one of its most personal forms. It begins not with a lesson plan, but with a learner.

Every student arrives with a different story.

One may be preparing for IGCSE English. Another may be an A Level student exploring Shakespeare. Another may be a nurse preparing for IELTS before beginning a new life in another country.

Each learner brings different aspirations, experiences, strengths and levels of confidence. Good teaching recognises those differences.

Before I teach, I listen. I want to understand where the student is now, where they hope to go, and what is helping—or perhaps hindering—their journey. Together with the student—and, where appropriate, their family—we build a Programme of Learning that grows from that understanding.

That Programme of Learning is never intended to be fixed because education is a conversation rather than a prescription.

Every programme begins with understanding the learner and planning the next stage of their journey. From there, teaching, observation, questioning and regular formative assessment continually deepen that understanding. As the learner grows, the Programme of Learning grows with them. Sometimes the original plan remains exactly right; sometimes new strengths emerge, unexpected difficulties appear or educational priorities change. Good teaching responds thoughtfully to those changes, refining the programme so that it continues to meet the learner where they are.

This is why one of the guiding principles of The English Bridge is so simple:

Every student deserves to be met where they are.

This principle applies whether I am teaching one student or a small group. Groups may share a common purpose, but they are always made up of individuals. Every student deserves to be met where they are, and good teaching never loses sight of the person behind the programme.

For students preparing for public examinations, that educational journey has a clear destination. Throughout the programme, regular formative assessment guides learning, so that when the time comes for the final examination, it is not a leap into the unknown but the natural culmination of months of thoughtful preparation.

My hope is that a student opens the examination paper and quietly thinks:

“Yes. I know how to approach this.”

That quiet moment of recognition matters. Not simply because it may lead to a higher grade, but because it reflects something deeper: confidence that has grown through understanding rather than anxiety.

The English Bridge was founded on a simple conviction: education is not the delivery of lessons, but the thoughtful construction of an educational partnership.

Tutoring, at its best, is simply good teaching. Like all good teaching, it is carried out with care, attention and the freedom to meet every student where they are, guiding them thoughtfully towards their own educational goals.

That is the bridge I hope to build.