Ric Nolfi

My name is Ric Nolfi, 62 years old, EAP Lecturer at the University of Northampton, UK.

My teaching career started in 2005, when I obtained my Cambridge CELTA Teaching Certificate.

From the very next day, I started teaching English, abroad and in the UK, Germany, The Czech Republic, Italy, The UAE, China and Japan. Every single experience has been worth the effort and rewarding; they all have brought an invaluable contribution towards my professional and human growth.

In the last eleven years of my twenty-one years teaching experience, I have shifted the focus of my teaching career towards Academic English and for this reason I have lately been working at universities, teaching and coordinating Pre-sessional and In-sessional courses, researching and selecting/preparing EAP syllabi, besides other Academic related subjects, such as, for example Critical Thinking.

In this period of my professional life, I have gained a good reputation as a professional and this has highly contributed to my commitment to CPD in this environment, which I want to pursue in different contests, in order to have a broader spectrum in this fascinating profession.

I am a philosopher by training - University of Cambridge and I completed a course on Critical Reasoning and Logic with the University of Oxford.

An area of particular interest for me is Phonetics, namely the Prosodic features of it. This due to the realisation of how important this area is for any learner of English as well as how neglected or scarcely dealt with it is. Therefore, ten years ago I published “The Melody of English”, published in the UK by and Amazon.co.uk, available online as paperback and e-book and seven years ago, I published the natural follow-up to my first publication, “The Melody of English … on Intonation”.

My approach to new technologies is extremely open and experimental; I strongly believe that
the future of teaching is tightly linked to our capacity to blend our knowledge with all those
tools technology is and will be offering to us. I am familiar with the use of VLE, Interactive
whiteboards, with the use of MS Office software, Google applications (Docs, Drive, etc). I am also proficient with the use of platforms such as Blackboard Learn and Cisco WebEx.