Steve Oakes, Head of Teacher Training at International House Budapest

Steve Oakes is the Head of Teacher Training at International House Budapest. IH Budapest offers a cheap CELTA course. Students of this course receive poorly written, ungrammatical documentation referred to as “the bendy file,”  because it is so skimpy that it bends.

I witnessed a bank robbery recently. The robber was caught the next day. I wish I could have told the bank robber before he committed the crime that if he felt that he had to resort to crime, he could rob people legally in the EFL field, without having to threaten people with guns. Anyone can excel in the EFL field, and the ability to create a grammatical sentence is not required, as evidenced by Mr. Oakes.

Here are some of the problems that I found in Mr. Oakes’ IH Budpaest biography page. I reported these problems to Mr. Oakes in a letter that was delivered to IH Budapest on February 20, 2012. I have not received a response from Mr. Oakes. I reported these problems to Dr. Mike Milanovic, Chief Executive of Cambridge ESOL, in a letter dated March 5, 2012. I have not received a response from Cambridge ESOL. As of February 6, 2013, Mr. Oakes' biography has not been revised.

 

Quoted text is in red. My revision is in blue.

"I immediately fell in love with teaching and made an instant career change, scraping by as a volunteer/lowly paid (and untrained) teacher for awhile and then going to Japan in July 1989, where I worked as a highly paid (and marginally trained) teacher for a few years."

• "[a]while" is an adverb. An adverb cannot be made the object of a preposition. What you mean is "a while."
• "going to Japan in July 1989" is a dangling participle. This becomes clear when some of the optional elements are removed, as follows:

I immediately fell in love with teaching and made an instant career change and then going to Japan in July 1989.

To correct this problem, you might change "going" to a verb and place it in a separate clause. Here is an example:

I immediately fell in love with teaching and made an instant career change. In July 1989 I went to Japan….