Penny Ur was educated at the universities of Oxford (MA), Cambridge (PGCE) and Reading (MATEFL). She emigrated to Israel in 1967, where she still lives today.

Penny Ur has thirty years’ experience as an English teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Now retired, she has taught courses at BA and MA level at Oranim Academic College of Education and Haifa University, and has lectured extensively at language teachers’ conferences worldwide. She is interested in all aspects of language-teaching methodology, but in particular in issues of vocabulary and grammar in language teaching, language-learning activity design and, more recently, English as an international language and the place of research as a source of professional knowledge.

She was for ten years the editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series. Her books include Grammar practice activities (2nd Edition) (2009), Vocabulary activities (2012), A course in English language teaching (2012), Discussions and more (2014), Penny Ur’s 100 tips (2016).

Chris Roland  is a trainer and methodology writer based at ELI, a language academy in Seville. He has worked with teachers in numerous countries and contexts. He is a tutor on Trinity Certificate and Diploma courses for OxfordTEFL, Barcelona, and has held positions with the British Council in both Spain and Syria. His first book Understanding Teenagers in the ELT classroom (2018) was nominated for an ELTon award. His second book Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom (2020) has also recently been published by Pavilion — with another volume Structuring Fun for Young Language Learners Online also about to come out.

His current areas of work are: helping teachers to adapt to online teaching for YL’s and teens, coping with L1 and student cross-talk, the psychological terrain of a teacher’s working day, task design, the micro-mechanics of going over exercises and the workings of what we call ‘fun’.

His sessions are highly practical and filled with photos, anecdotes and examples of student work from his own lessons. 

Annamaria Pinter is a Reader at the Department of Applied Linguistics, the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests focus on all aspects of second/ foreign language education for children, task-based second language teaching and learning and engaging children actively in research. She has published widely in the area of teaching English to children and has a strong international reputation in TEYL and second language teacher education. She is the author of Teaching Young Language Learners Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers, Oxford University Press (second edition, 2017) and Children Learning Second Languages, Palgrave Macmillan (2011). She is also the joint series editor of the Multilingual Matters series entitled Early Language learning in School Contexts.