Ellie Caudwell Casey

Euan (00:00)
Welcome back to I taught English Abroad. And I'm delighted to say today I'm joined by Ellie Casey, who you might know as Ellie English UK. And you'll absolutely know her from her Instagram account. We'll get on to that later on. Ellie, how are you doing today?

Ellie (00:44)
Hiya, I'm alright, how are you?

Euan (00:48)
I'm good, yeah, I'm good. I'm really excited to talk to you because as kind of alluded to there, you know, you're someone who's built up your own business and you work on these specific kind of niches within English learning that I think people are going to really respond to. So without further ado, I'm curious as to how you got started. So what was your route to becoming a pronunciation expert? And it's fair to say, you know, a hugely influential English language teacher.

what kind of spurred your study and your career?

Ellie (01:19)
Well, where do you want me to begin? I mean, as I was growing up, I always loved English, loved linguistics. I didn't know I loved linguistics until I went to university because I didn't know linguistics existed. But English was always kind of my first love. I went to university, studied linguistics. I actually felt like I was a bit of a fraud because it was so interesting. I just thought, gosh, is this really like a proper degree? But it was.

And yeah, so I did my degree in linguistics and then I went on and did a master's in linguistics and phonetics. And sort of following that sort of, you know, a couple of years out doing other things. But then I went back to university and I trained to be a secondary school English teacher. So my first job was teaching teenagers in a small suburb of Leeds or a suburb of Leeds, which was OK. I didn't love it. You know, I'm not going to pretend I didn't love it.

Euan (01:47)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (02:16)
But actually when I had my third child, childcare just became so expensive that I left at that point. Started working, well, yeah, so I started then working as a private tutor. And as a private tutor, still at that point, looking at English, you know, like GCSE English, A level English, you know, that side of English. Had a little website.

got people in. Oh gosh, oh really sorry. I don't know why I'm so nervous today. I don't know why I'm so nervous today. Right. Is that too awfully? Do you want me to do you want? Okay.

Euan (02:54)
That's fine. Don't worry, don't worry. It's okay. Jenny, just take your time and we can take… No, no, no.

That's perfect. If we start from, start with the website and then kind of take it from there. That's, we've got, as long as you want to take with us, it's absolutely okay. Don't worry about it.

Ellie (03:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. So I realised that in order to get more private students, I was going to need a website. Luckily, my brother is very techie and he actually had a server in his house. I don't know how you can have a server in your house, but he had a server in his house. We built this tiny website. And I am not joking. I am absolutely not joking that within a few minutes of that website going live, I had my first inquiry.

Euan (03:37)
Right.

Ellie (03:46)
to the point that I thought it was my other brother hoaxing. And I very nearly hung up on that person, because I really just thought it was my brother. But no, they were real, and they stayed with me for ages. And actually, for a long time, it worked really well. I had this tiny little website, basic as it can possibly be. And then algorithms kind of changed, and it just became absolutely impossible to find that website. So at that point, I realised OK,

I'm going to need to start going online. I'm going to suddenly have to open an Instagram account or a Facebook account or whatever. Just in order to sort of help the visibility of that website. And at some point, sort of during all of that, I'd made the switch from teaching English to native English speakers in schools, so teaching English teenagers to teaching English as a foreign language. Now, I never trained in English as a foreign language, which…

feels like a bit of an Achilles heel, it feels like my deep dark secret. But I do have a first class degree in linguistics and I've got a distinction at masters. So, you know, I've got the knowledge. So, yeah, so at some point I sort of made that switch to teaching English as a foreign language. And when I first started going on Instagram and first started sort of having posts on Instagram, I was kind of advertising myself or marketing myself as…

general English, so you know, a bit of grammar, let's have a post on a bit of vocabulary, let's have a bit of phrasal verbs, let's have a bit of blah, blah, blah. And then during the pandemic, actually, I was busy, you know, trying to keep my business going, trying to home educate my kids, trying to look after myself. And I realised that actually, the very, very, very simplest

social media that I could produce would be around pronunciation because that was my training because I'd spent years at uni studying, you know, formants and acoustics and all of that. So I started putting out really detailed pronunciation videos like, you know, you want to make the first one was actually TH. So if you're going to make a TH, this is where your tongue goes. This is how much air you need. This is, you know, what your vocal folds are doing.

And they started going down really well. And it was like, oh, right. Well, this is actually way easier to produce this kind of content than it is to produce grammar rules or whatever. So then that was it. And I just started creating the loads and loads of videos just around pronunciation. And just through sticking with it and just through consistency.

Euan (06:07)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (06:32)
it's kind of worked really and now I've got a business which is fully focused on pronunciation which is amazing because I love it and I keep thinking gosh am I ever going to get bored of talking about you know tongue position or whatever and I don't seem to be doing it does seem to be really really interesting and I think like anything actually the you know the deeper you get into anything the more interesting it becomes actually and you know the more the more you geek out on something.

interesting it becomes. So yes, that was my route into pronunciation teaching.

Euan (07:06)
He he.

I love that and I love the phrase geek out because we are absolutely going to mine in on the finer details. But to those who don't know what you do and what your classes are like, how would you kind of explain your methodology? Like if someone was coming to you for their first lesson in English as a foreign language, what could they expect?

Ellie (07:26)
Well, the very first thing is I just need to really listen to them. So I give them, I've got a few sentences that I've written, which are sort of hitting most of the problematic sounds. You know, we're looking at things like linking sounds and drop sounds and stuff in them as well. So they'll read out a few sentences for me. I will just want to listen to them speak as well, just so I can really get a good, a good sense of, you know, what their strengths are with their pronunciation, but also where we need to focus.

because you don't need to focus on everything. And, you know, one particular sound can be really challenging for one particular speaker and easy for another. So it's really about understanding that individual's voice. And then from then on, you know, I very much believe in teaching. I mean, because my background is linguistics, I…

I teach the vowel quadrilateral, for example, so I expect my students to be familiar with the vowel quadrilateral. I expect them to be familiar with let's call sets because that's how I was taught. And that's I don't really know how else you could teach pronunciation other than that way. So then we will pick out two or three vowels. First of all, I always start with vowels that are.

sort of having the biggest impact really, the biggest impact to their overall sound. We'll then do the same with a few consonants and then we'll move on to the bigger features. We'll start looking at stress, we'll start looking at intonation, linking sounds, drop sounds, all the connected speech features and sort of build it up from there. And it very much depends on the individual student as well. Some find it very easy and we can just whiz through some of the…

some of the sounds really quickly and get on to the connected speech, whereas others we end up staying on a particular sound or a few sounds for much longer. And it very much just depends on that student's own, like where they are, how easy they find it, how much work they put in, what their starting point is, what their level of patience is.

some students come to me because they are absolutely going 100 percent, they want to sound British, they want to absolutely pass as British and in which case, you know, the attention to detail there that's needed is, you know, it's very, very, very fine grained work. Whereas with others, it's just like, no, you know, I'm never going to sound British, I don't care, I just need to sound a bit clearer and, you know, I just need people not to repeat myself.

So it's very very individual and it's very catered to what the student needs.

Euan (10:11)
Mm -hmm.

And something just kind of jumps out at me there because I feel that there's lots of different ways to kind of to get your start in learning English. And I imagine that, you know, some people will be very, very focused on vocabulary and then kind of fitting the pronunciation into that once they've learned the vocab. For you, does it kind of come the other way in the sense that proper pronunciation and proper kind of received linguistics? Do you think that's the best the best foundation for language learning, in your opinion, or does it not quite work that way?

Ellie (10:45)
Well, I mean, I would say that pronunciation needs to come first because that's how I see everything. I do have, I have quite a lot of students who have got real fossilised mistakes in with pronunciation. And however many times we look at, you know, pronouncing parents, for example, it will never move away from parents. You know, it's so fossilised. And in that sense, I wish that more students would

kind of really understand the importance of pronunciation early on. Now, obviously, if you're an absolute beginner, then I don't think it's necessarily a good use of your time to be absolutely drilling tiny sounds when you can't even, you know, when you're still sort of A1 one level. But I think it needs to come in sooner rather than later. You know, vocabulary sort of can always be built up, I think. But pronunciation, you know, pronunciation.

It's very physical. It's, it's, I, you know, I tell my students all the time, it's like going to the gym. It's like training for a marathon. It's not something that you can do in a weekend. You know, if you hit the textbooks this weekend, you could have present perfect sorted, or you could have your gerunds and infinitives sorted. You couldn't have your pronunciation sorted in a weekend because it's about muscles and it's about building them up and it's about muscle memory and it's…

And it's all of those things. So I really do think the earlier you can begin to really focus on pronunciation, the easier it becomes later. And you don't have these fossilized errors in there, these fossilized mistakes that we need to unpick again.

Euan (12:32)
Now just kind of taking it back a little bit to your initial experiences in teaching and if my research is correct you became a qualified teacher in 2008. Can you tell me about those initial experiences as you said in that sort of suburban secondary school near Leeds. What were those kind of initial experiences as a teacher then and how do you compare them to what you're doing now and how kind of specific and how…

I guess like collegiate what you're doing is now like how would you kind of compare how would you compare those times?

Ellie (13:04)
I mean, it's absolutely, it's the world away. It couldn't be more different really. You know, I think secondary school teaching, I think any classroom teaching, you know, in a school, I think, you know, it's incredibly tough work. It's really tough work. And, you know, I mean, I know I found, you know, the hours, I mean, we kind of know all this, it's in the news all the time, but the hours of a secondary school teacher are

gruelling, actually, which I know sounds a bit much, but you know, I really think they are. And I remember, you know, not being able to be there at my kids, you know, first day of nursery or gosh, you know, one of my children had a health problem at one point and my husband had to take the day off work to take him to hospital for an x -ray and I couldn't get the day off work. And it's just like, what? You know?

But the pressure that you are under, I think, as a school teacher, I think is absolutely immense. Now, that isn't to say that I have this easy life and I just sit here with my feet up and I absolutely don't. I still work very, very hard, but I have a lot more flexibility. First of all, I have a lot more flexibility with who I work with. I don't work with students that I don't like.

Euan (14:29)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (14:31)
You know, sounds really harsh, but if there's not that kind of vibe there, if there's not that, you know, if there's not that sort of chemistry, I guess, I don't work with people, which makes my life already hugely easier because I like everybody. And because I work now with adults, there is much more of a sense of being kind of…

Euan (14:34)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Ellie (14:57)
team players, you know, this is your pronunciation, these are your goals. I am absolutely going to help you get there, but I'm also not going to be working at midnight on a Sunday. You know, it's these are your goals. And so actually, I mean, I still work very long hours and I still do the probably the same number of hours that I did in classroom teaching. But first of all, I have that flexibility over my time.

Euan (15:11)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (15:27)
So, you know, I now never miss anything that I don't want to miss that my kids doing.

And yeah, it's just an altogether much more pleasant life, in my opinion. And just sort of, know, being responsible, responsible, sorry, for your own professional development and, you know, being able to sort of go where your interest takes you rather than it being like, right, Ofsted have said this, so we need to study, you know, we need to focus on this. And like, oh, gosh. Yeah, yeah.

Euan (15:43)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Now, you advertise a class on your website that isn't just about learning the English language, it's about British culture too. Now, without giving too much away, because I don't want to give away the secret sauce of your classes for free, that'd be insane. But what aspects of British culture do English learners, what do they find most interesting and what do you find people respond to most?

Ellie (16:22)
I mean a lot of people like to talk about the royal family actually I was quite surprised about that Yeah, there's quite a lot of royal chat, but I think what people actually like is they like to have a real sort of insight into Sort of daily life really so I mean on my stories on Instagram for example I am always kind of you know out about and chatting about stuff, but

I will often share articles. So I've got one article, for example, that is really popular with students, which is about wild running. It's called Run Wild by Boff Wally. It's really, really, really good books. We read the introduction for that and we are using it to build up pronunciation and work on pronunciation. But it's also got this kind of, you know, this this information about fell running in there, which, you know, you don't hear about fell running, I don't think, if you don't live in the north, I don't think.

or certainly if you don't live in the UK. And, you know, I always do, like anything that I choose to work with is always sort of has a British vibe. Part of my kind of brand as well, if you like, is that I teach British English rather than American English. Nothing wrong with American English, it's fine. You know, no, nothing there, but, you know, I teach British English and therefore, you know, any…

Any texts, any conversation tend to be around what's going on in the UK. Students will often ask me little bits about maybe something they've seen in the news and like, you know, why has that thing sort of happened and why, you know, what's your opinion on this and so on. I was talking this morning to a student about food banks actually in the UK and sort of because it wasn't really something that she was very familiar with. And

So it's all just kind of what goes on in daily life. Now I'm also aware that this is all a little bit vague, like what is it that makes the UK the UK, that makes us different from other places? And of course there isn't one thing and there are loads of overlaps and stuff. And I also have this worry all the time that if I kind of go too far into saying, oh, I want to tell you about British culture and so on,

that everyone's going to think that I'm a raving right wing nationalist lunatic. And I can absolutely assure you that I'm not. But I've had people ask me about Brexit, for example, and it's like, well, why do you think British people vote for Brexit? And I'm like, I don't think I can do that. Maybe I can. And so on. So I think it's just sort of that insight, really, of what's going on in day to day life.

Euan (18:53)
out. Yeah.

Hmm.

Uhhh…

Yeah.

Ellie (19:14)
But the Royals, I'm really amazed by how many people want to support the Royal Family because, you know, I'm just like, really? Okay, but we do, it's fine.

Euan (19:24)
Yeah, I mean, for the purposes of my own continued employment, I'll leave my opinions about the Royal Family to myself. But to kind of pick up on that a little bit, though, as someone with a really strong connection to Leeds and to Yorkshire, and as, you know, I actually myself have connection to Yorkshire, I've got family who live in what was Cleveland and is now Yorkshire. Do you ever, you know,

Ellie (19:30)
Yes.

Euan (19:48)
Is there ever a part of you that sort of, you know, people ask about the Royal Family, people ask about kind of London and stuff like that. Is there a part of you that goes like, no, we're going to talk about, you know, we're going to talk about the North, we're going to bring in, you know, some Yorkshire pronunciations in for fun and we're going to talk about different dialects and accents and that kind of thing. Does that ever come up? Because I've got to imagine, you know, someone as passionate as you is going to talk about these things.

Ellie (20:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, it really does. It really does. Because I think, you know, the view of the UK for the rest of the world is very London centric. And I, you know, I'm very much like, you know, my parents in law live in Northumberland. So I'm always like, whenever we're up there, I'm always like, look at these castles, look at this coast, look at these beaches, look at, you know, really, I should get a job for the tourist board, really. But in terms of pronunciation, I

Euan (20:23)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Ellie (20:34)
My stated goal is that I will teach a kind of standard British accent which would not stand up to any kind of academic scrutiny like what is a standard British accent but I do try and sort of keep out any strong regional features. So I have a Northern accent as I'm showing you there it's not particularly strong Northern accent but it is a Northern accent. So for example the bath foul is short for me.

And I actually talk to my students about that and I say, you know, for me in the north of England, also, you know, America, also other northern parts of the UK, we're going to have this short vowel here. So we say bath. Other words, France, last laugh, all of that. Do you want that accent or do you want to go the kind of more standard southern way? And do you want to say bath, etc.?

And I let them choose because it's not up to me what pronunciation somebody wants to learn. But I do make it very clear that I have Northern features of my accent. Saying that, I don't want to particularly become a Yorkshire accent trainer, partly because I don't know that there's so much demand for Yorkshire accent trainers rather than British English trainers. I do need to pay my bills.

Euan (21:56)
I mean, I would argue I've watched enough Emmerdale to insist that there is a major need for Yorkshire accent training, but that's its own separate issue. But talking of that kind of thing, I've had some really interesting conversations with non -native English speakers who become teachers and they tell me about how they learned English. And there's some really interesting stuff that's come up. So I had one guest that talked about learning from Spider -Man cassettes.

Ellie (22:03)
Thank you.

Euan (22:22)
one person that was inspired by Shakira, one person that was inspired by the Backstreet Boys learning English and that kind of thing. I'm just wondering when we talk about British culture and we talk about received pronunciation and that kind of thing, is there anything that you integrate from popular culture or from media that kind of illustrates any points that you make?

Ellie (22:41)
I, as part of my pronunciation course, there are quite a few videos in there that are, they're used for shadowing, they're also used for listening skills, sort of a bit of a crossover. And although I don't use them directly to say, oh, look, here we are doing this thing, because I teach that and I model that on my own speech. So like, you know, a linking sound, for example, I would model that on my own speech. However, what we do,

notice or certainly more advanced students notice are some irregularities of pronunciation maybe. So, I mean, Alexa Chung, for example, I've got a video of Alexa Chung on my website that students use, as I said already, for primarily foreshadowing, but actually the way that she pronounces Tuh.

is all over the place and it's really interesting. Like so sometimes she pronounces it as a glottal stop, sometimes it says a duh, sometimes it's released, sometimes it's not released and it's very, very interesting. And my advanced students will notice that and we will talk about that and we'll talk about, you know, the changes in pronunciation. And, you know, they will also bring to me examples, you know, it's like I overheard somebody say this thing or…

Euan (23:37)
Mm.

Ellie (24:03)
you know, some, I have quite a few students that live in the UK actually, and sometimes they'll record things for me and bring them into class and we can look at them and, you know, like things that they can't understand and like, okay, why can't you understand it? It's because this sound has been dropped or the way that they're pronouncing this vowel is a non -standard way and this is also another pronunciation of this particular vowel or, you know, so on, so on.

Yeah.

Euan (24:36)
I mean, I find this, I wouldn't be in the job I would be in if I didn't find this really fascinating. And I think there's so much about the English language that's, I think maybe native speakers take for granted in some ways. And I think it's got to be as well a massive obstacle as well in terms of learning English, you know, how kind of quirky and idiosyncratic it is, especially to Romantic languages from Europe. And, you know, as someone who deals with pronunciation and phrasing and

someone who clearly loves the English language as much as you do, I have to ask you, what's your favourite kind of quirk or idiosyncrasy or idiom or not even, it doesn't even have to be something that you teach necessarily, but is there something that's come up and you've gone, that couldn't be in another language, that's just so kind of strange, but we take it as read.

Ellie (25:19)
Ah, yeah. Ah, gosh. I think one of the things that I do really love about language is the history that's in it. And so I am constantly spotting connections with things and, you know, constantly…

Yeah, constantly kind of seeing connections between things that I hadn't seen before and you know between different words and different words in English and also different words in different languages as well. I'm trying to think what always…

Yeah, yeah, I don't know really, I'm sure I'm going to think of loads tonight and be like, I should have said that, I should have said that. But I think it's just the richness of the language, actually. And I always like it when I find two words that are synonyms, but they are such close synonyms, I can't even find the difference between them. That always, I always find that quite exciting. And I also can't think of the exact name.

Euan (26:13)
Mm -hmm.

I really like that.

Ellie (26:28)
But like, you know, like, I don't know, like, like big and large is not a very good example of that. But, you know, when there's so close in meaning that you're just like, yeah, I don't know why these two words exist. Yeah.

Euan (26:43)
No, I hear you. I did put you on the spot with that, I have to admit a little bit. But in terms of the people that come to you for lessons, your students as well, to use a synonym or the correct word if you like, your students, what particular sounds and words do they respond to the most, do you think? And what are the real problem areas that before you started teaching you might not have anticipated?

Ellie (27:08)
Yeah, so I mean everyone knows that TH in English is difficult because so few other languages have it but actually I think because people know it's difficult I think most students can do it or they can do it fairly you know it's not so very hard really that one. Things like the lot vowel that one is a really tricky vowel and I didn't really have any idea that that was so tricky so like you know words like lot, heart, knots, cloth all of that lot.

That one's really, really hard. And some students… I mean, I had a student for a whole year and her English was brilliant. And yet every sort of two, three weeks, we had to come back to that vowel and tighten it back up again. And this is why pronunciation is so physical. It's so much like going to the gym. If you don't go regularly, you lose it again a little bit.

So that lot of vowel is very difficult. The nurse vowel and the goat vowels are also really tricky. And I don't really… I'm always intrigued as to why. Like, what is it about those particular sounds that are so difficult for so many learners? And it's not just learners from one language. It's right across the board, really. Yeah.

Euan (28:35)
And just finally, before we take another quick break, I'm just wondering about the types of students that you have. Obviously, we talked before about how students are really keen to learn about, quote unquote, British culture and different aspects of what it's like living on these islands. I just wondered about your students and where do they come from and what have they taught you about the rest of the world? And how exciting is it for you to be?

Yes, you're based in your home office, but in a sense you get to travel around the world and meet people from different cultures and that kind of thing. How important has that been in terms of your overall enjoyment of what you do for a living?

Ellie (29:09)
amazing, it's absolutely amazing, you know, really sort of hearing so many, so many different points of view. And, you know, like in conversation classes, we food comes up a lot, actually, food and festivals come up a lot, just naturally reoccurring topics, really. And I really find it interesting, like all the different, all the different foods that people have, and also the similarities between us all, like everybody has pancakes, like they're different shapes.

Euan (29:25)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (29:38)
and different thicknesses, different overall surface area. But every culture has pancakes. Why is that then? So there's that. But then there is the flip side of that. Because I think English teaching, first of all, I think English teaching is…

or any language teaching is quite unique in the sense that you really get to know your students very, very well because you're dealing with talking and communication and sharing ideas versus, you know, I don't know, like a maths teacher or something where there's that distance. So I know that I have had a lot of students who, you know, I've got to know them very, very well. And then things have happened, like political upheaval has happened.

Euan (30:10)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (30:32)
And, you know, I remember when the war in Ukraine started, I didn't sleep that weekend because I knew so many students directly affected by it. And that's definitely a downside. And it's definitely something that I've really had to consciously develop a much thicker skin around it and not sort of maybe allow people to sort of get quite so close to me, actually.

Euan (30:34)
Mm -hmm.

Right.

Ellie (31:02)
That's been sort of quite a big learning curve for me, I think, as well, as just keeping that sort of professional distance. I'm not there yet. I don't think I'll ever be there, but I'm better than I was.

Euan (31:03)
Mm -hmm.

It's definitely something that I've got teachers in my family and that connection with pupils is, I don't think people think about it as much as they should. It can be such an integral part of your job. It's not just about necessarily learning. It's about being a pair of ears for someone and being someone that's there for them at a particular moment.

Ellie (31:37)
Yeah.

Euan (31:43)
Now on the Teflonog, in our blogs and our pages, we talk a lot about finding a niche when it comes to English. People are after something very particular a lot of the time. It's not just an umbrella term of, hey, you can speak English now. There's lots of different parts of it. So with your kind of academic history and studying linguistics and you really honed in on a specific area, I would say.

When did that kind of come to you, specifically in terms of pronunciation, doing conversation classes? Was it a sudden kind of light bulb moment or was it a longer process of finding out what your strengths are and what you enjoy teaching the most?

Ellie (32:22)
It was a sort of light bulb moment in the sense that I was actually, so it was during the pandemic and I was reading a book about basically how to make your life easier, especially sort of in terms of business. And one of the comments in the book was that your kind of your social media, what you post, what you put out there does not have to be perfect. It can be, you are allowed to do what is easy.

And I mean, as I said already, creating short pronunciation videos was very easy. And then, you know, from that point, I just thought, OK, rather than just being a general English teacher and trying to compete with thousands of other general English teachers online, I am just going to do pronunciation. But it was for, I mean, even, you know, for the

the first bit of time, it really was about what is the easiest content for me to create. And that was my primary thought. It wasn't that, okay, I adore pronunciation, and I'm going to go off and I'm going to become a pronunciation teacher, and I'm going to, you know, blah, blah, blah. It really was literally, what is easy stuff. Now, in hindsight, it's very easy to see that, of course, I was always going to end up teaching pronunciation, because, you know, my dissertation,

both of my dissertations, my undergraduate dissertation and my postgraduate dissertation were both about R, about the sound R. So I've written 25 ,000 words on R, not even any old R, you know, pre -vocalic R. And I just think, and so now, obviously I look back at that and think, well, of course you're going to get really geeks out on tiny bits of pronunciation if you can handle 25 ,000 words on one single sound.

in one single environment. But I didn't know it at the time. I really didn't know it at the time. And I mean, when I was a classroom teacher, I felt very much like a bit of a fraud really, because my degree was linguistics and not literature. So most English teachers in schools come from an English literature background and I was come from a linguistics background. And I was like, oh, gosh, well, how do I fit in here? And…

And actually, teaching now, it's still, I occasionally, I mean, before we recorded this, I emailed you to say, but you know, I haven't got a tethyl, don't you? And it really sort of, I do think, oh gosh, I'm gonna be found out, I'm gonna be found out.

Euan (34:58)
Yeah.

Ellie (35:04)
Yes, I think I've just forgotten the question actually.

Euan (35:09)
No, you've answered it. And what's really striking to me is that someone as successful as you has, and we'll talk about the success you've had shortly, but you've described it being easy for you to do these things and you've described yourself as a fraud, which I know is probably for a sort of comic effect a little bit, but equally.

I mean, that's an interesting way to frame it because surely these things are quote unquote easy to you because you're especially good at them. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're easy objectively. In fact, that can't be the case at all. And talking about the success you've had, and we'll talk a lot more about that because I think it's an area we need to mine. Did it surprise you that when you found a specialism and a methodology that you like the best and it is the one that you use in your classes, were you surprised by the success it had? Because as you see,

Within minutes of setting up your website, you had clients and you've got, you know, you described the connection that you've had with, with pupils.

Ellie (36:02)
Yeah, I mean that was extraordinary.

Yeah, I think having that client instantly was extraordinary and I don't think that would happen again. I think that really was just a pure stroke of luck. But…

I'm really sorry. Just tell me the question again.

Euan (36:22)
It's alright. Sorry, I do tend to waffle a bit. But did it surprise you, you know, having found… Did it surprise you when you found a specialism and you found a methodology that worked for you that ended up being as successful as it has been?

Ellie (36:25)
I don't know what I do I hear.

Yeah, I think it did. I think it did purely because there was no kind of real planning behind it. It really was, you know, this, you know, so I mean, I've mentioned already, you know, like teaching the vowel quadrilateral, how else would you even teach vowels and the relationship between vowels and all of that without actually getting into the linguistics of it and actually explaining what the difference is between

rounded and unrounded and front and back and long and short and diphthong and monotone. And so I just kind of leap into all of that. And it obviously does does resonate. But I mean, it's really interesting, because I feel like I'm working in a really crowded market. I feel like there's loads of pronunciation teachers. And I guess that's because the people that I look at are pronunciation teachers. But I guess, you know, overall, they're still aren't.

that many people just purely focusing in on pronunciation. And it was slightly weird because I've got lots of other skills in English that have sort of gone really. I mean, I'm very good at academic writing, for example. So there was a while that I was doing quite a lot of academic writing and quite a lot of proofreading and so on. But it was the pronunciation that…

that took off and that was the easiest to sort of convey, I think, in marketing and in messaging, you know, it was sort of more accessible and more interesting for people, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Euan (38:19)
And that kind of that really neatly leads me on to the next question, which I'm always grateful when a guest does that. For anyone listening who's sort of trying to figure out their own identity as a teacher, what advice would you give? I mean, we kind of touched on it there, but is there a point where you go like, OK, I found my thing now. This is this is my area.

Ellie (38:37)
I think you need to think about what you enjoy the most and what is the easiest for you. So regardless of what you're teaching, there are always going to be aspects of the class that you enjoy more, that you, just easier for you. And I would just lean into what is easy because the stuff that is easy is probably the stuff that you are good at and probably the stuff that you are going to be most interested in.

I think there is also a little bit of an element of you just kind of have to make a decision as well. I think it's very, very, very, very good idea to niche down. I think it's much easier to get new students in if you have niche down. And I think in many ways you are just better just choosing something that you know that you are good at and that you enjoy and just going with it.

So, you know, I know that, you know, on Instagram, there are teachers who will only look at getting students from C1 to C2 in the Cambridge and presumably from looking at them, they are getting enough work. And I think they probably do do better than than than sort of generalists. And I think you can put your prices up as well. I think you can charge more when you're a specialist as well. So, yeah.

Just don't overthink it, I think. Just think about what you think you're good at and what you enjoy and just go that way.

Euan (40:10)
In terms of what you're good at, you're especially good at building an audience and doing videos and pronunciation that have been absolutely like gangbusters. They've gone around the world several times. So tell me about when you were building your business and that kind of building your social media following. Was there kind of a strategy that you had or was that a case of I like doing this and if it's obvious that I like doing this and it's useful, people will respond to it. What was the kind of plan at first in terms of building your social media presence?

Ellie (40:14)
Thank you.

All right, so at first, the very, very first thing I did was I just would only have written posts. And then I realised that I needed video and you cannot, video is just so much more engaging. But I mean, I was terrified. I was terrified to the point that I even had to have a little bit of counselling to get me over that hurdle of being able to record videos and have my face out there, even though like the first videos were seen by, you know,

30 people or something. I was utterly, utterly terrified. I spent a really long time being really frightened about haters and trolls and all of that, you know, the nasty side of the internet. And then. And I don't really know what I can say about that. I think ultimately you just have to sort of make a decision as I made a decision.

to think, well, I could either be so terrified of it and not do it, or I could just think, okay, well, I'm going to go for it. And actually, the first time I went live on Instagram, somebody throughout the whole of the live told me to F off, like somebody just typed in the comments for the whole live, F off, F off, F And I didn't know how to remove somebody from a live. I didn't know how, I didn't realize I could kind of block them on the spot.

Euan (41:53)
Mistake.

Ellie (41:59)
But then afterwards, I was like, huh, is that it? Is that all you've got? You know, it's only a word. I used to work in a pub. You know, I've heard that word before plenty of times. So in a way, that was actually very liberating, you know, to actually be sworn out was liberating. But I do…

Euan (42:01)
Hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Hehehehe.

Ellie (42:22)
I do still get comments and especially because I mean one of the challenges I think of making pronunciation videos and making pronunciation kind of seem easy and accessible is that you do have to simplify things and I don't simplify things nothing's ever wrong that I teach but the comments that I get now and I do definitely get these comments are that

such, you know, so I, you know, I mentioned earlier about sort of talking about teaching a general British accent. Well, that doesn't even mean anything, a general British accent. So then you'll get people coming along saying, oh, well, they don't sound like that in Cardiff, or they don't sound like that in Newcastle, or, and, and I had an incident recently, it was quite recently, actually, it really did get under my skin, where,

Euan (43:10)
Hmm.

Ellie (43:19)
I was posting on Facebook because I just automate my posts, you know, so I don't even kind of necessarily even know on a day to day basis what's going out on every channel. And somebody had been kind of receiving my post, you know, my post had been suggested to him and he was getting more and more annoyed and he was writing these comments under these videos and getting more and more annoyed. I was off for the weekend, so I didn't even see any of these comments. I logged in on Monday morning and he wound himself up.

Euan (43:45)
Hehehehe

Ellie (43:48)
And then so he was kind of going through all of my videos insulting me. And I think he really systematically went through all of my videos. And then somebody else came along and she started insulting me. And then they sort of met like this love story in the comments of my videos of these two people just insulting me. And I mean, that did get under my skin, actually. And we were talking about whether…

whether you pronounce an R after a vowel in standard British English. And I'm just like, we don't, you know, I know that lots of parts of the UK do, but in standard British English, we don't. And they're saying, you know, listen to the word heart. There's an R in heart. And I'm like, there's not an R in there. I kind of, I allowed myself to get sucked in, actually. And I was trying to explain to them.

how it worked and stuff and they didn't want to listen, they didn't want to listen and I did eventually block them. But that did get under my skin and that is the reality though of posting online that you are always going to get people saying bad stuff and I don't like it but you know it's just the way things are unfortunately and it doesn't happen very often. I get nice stuff far more.

far more often. So to go back to the original question, if anybody is sort of thinking, oh, I need to get posting more and I don't want to be a bit nervous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you just have to go for it. You just have to not not give these, you know, people headspace really.

Euan (45:25)
And you know what I think there is at the end of the day would you rather be the successful teacher that people are responding to and who has a presence or the person commenting something horrible. You'd pick option A every time you know it's kind of self -evident. Just before we carry on just off the record I used to in my old job I used to cover Scottish football and there was a YouTube element of it as well and

Ellie (45:36)
Yeah. Yeah, I see what you're doing.

Euan (45:51)
I don't know if you know much about it, but there's also kind of religious element to it. And it's, it's, yeah. So you can imagine the comments and stuff like that. So I get where you're coming from. Like it's, it's, and it's so difficult not to kind of read the bad stuff. It's like picking at a, like a, like a scratch or something. It's yeah. So I get it. I get where you're coming from. Just, you know.

Ellie (45:54)
Oh yeah, it's like Catholic, yeah.

And we have this tendency, don't we? We focus, though, don't we, on the negative. You really remember the negative. You don't remember the stuff where people are like, oh, thanks, you're really evil and lies. Always the bad stuff. Weird, isn't it? I guess it's like a primal thing to defend yourself, I guess. But no, weird.

Euan (46:27)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. Cool, so sorry, yeah, we'll go sort of back on the record now, but I just wanted to tell you I can relate to that. I know where you're coming from. And so I can't, you know, it's so impressive that I can't not talk about it. You know, at the time of recording, you're at 99 .5 thousand Instagram followers. So I know, you know, numbers aren't to be all and end all and everything, every teacher tells me that, but equally.

Ellie (46:38)
Yeah.

Euan (46:58)
A. That's got to feel quite good and B. What's it like having an audience of that size? Is it something that you ever anticipated?

Ellie (47:03)
No, it's really weird. It's really, really weird. Yeah, no, it is really weird. And I can't quite get my head around it, really. Like that is, I mean, I grew up in York and York had a hundred thousand people in it. And you could go into town and not see people, you know, you'd see someone you've never seen before in your life. And now my Instagram audience is a hundred thousand people.

Euan (47:23)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (47:31)
Yeah, no, I just find it really, really bizarre, actually. And because as well, so, you know, what happened was I was posting for like maybe two years or something and I was getting followers, but, you know, it was very, very slow. And then it just suddenly kind of mushroomed and, you know, went really quickly from sort of 40 ,000 to 100 ,000, I think was about four months. It was, you know, it was really fast.

And it sort of did take me a bit of time to sort of, because, you know, and things have had to change as things have grown as well. So, you know, when I had a really small account, I'd share pictures of my kids, for example, and now I do not share pictures of my children. And I have got, you know, I've had to really sort of think through what I am prepared to share and what aspects of my life are absolutely, you know, off limits and things like.

from my back garden, for example, if you look in a certain direction, you can see a very identifying building. So whenever I'm, I ever film anything in the back garden, I always have to be really careful that that's not in the background. And, you know, I used to film from my living room and now I'm like, no, I'm not filming from a living room. It's not, there's anything wrong with my living room. It's just a living room, but it's, you know, it's, it's my living room. I used to even film from bed sometimes, not in a…

Euan (48:56)
It's yours.

Ellie (48:58)
not in a sultry way, just like in a cold way. Just like a heating crisis kind of way. I'm going to get into the duvet, but I don't do that anymore either.

Euan (49:02)
You

Well, yeah, I mean that would be that's a whole Instagram terms of service thing. That's not it's not my area at all.

Ellie (49:13)
I'm sorry.

Euan (49:16)
hopefully Ellie, you're going to tell me about how quickly it takes to build a rapport with learners when you're teaching classes online. Is there anything in particular that helps? I hate to say it's a bit of a cliche, but helps to break the ice in the early stages, like any particular lessons or pronunciation or sound that you know you can really help a student get comfortable early on. Is there anything like that?

Ellie (49:39)
You see, I've always sort of had the belief that if you want to learn anything or improve anything, you just kind of need to get on with it. And I mean, I am friendly and we laugh a lot in class and so on, but I don't particularly see it as my job to… No, no, no.

No, no, no, no, hang on. Hang on, hang on, hang on.

Euan (50:11)
We can skip this question if you like.

Ellie (50:15)
It's just, you know, in school it was always about teaching fun lessons and I just don't believe in fun lessons, which is not to say that all my lessons are boring. I just don't like that pressure of…

So because I work with adults, I expect, you know, we're all human and, you know, people are nervous sometimes, but really I am, you know, I am mostly expecting that people are, you know, they're gonna be okay. And I don't really actually, I know this might be a bit controversial, but I don't really see it as my job to kind of create these fun icebreaker games or anything like that. I think that they're…

their confidence will come from knowing that they are in good hands, knowing that they are being kind of directed down the right path straight away, being given kind of relevant work straight away. Now, that's not to say, you know, lots of my students feel very nervous when, so they have to submit homework to me between sessions. So they…

So they send us little videos of themselves, a little voice recordings, and they can be quite hard to elicit because people do feel quite nervous of it. And I mean, really, I don't know what to say about that other than to reassure people that I will never share anything without permission. It is purely so I can listen. And if we are going to improve, this is the work that needs to happen.

Yeah, and I think as soon as people sort of realise that they are in good hands and that they are going to be looked after, we're all right, we're good to go.

Euan (52:04)
Excellent. And so from your years of teaching, are there any particular pupils that kind of come to mind as a success story? Is there anyone that you kind of keep an eye on just because they've gone on to do something really interesting with English? Is there anything that comes to mind if I say the word success stories?

Ellie (52:21)
Yeah, I mean, one of my really early ones actually was a real, real eye opener in, in, in, you know, in the sense of what really good English tuition does and what really good kind of chemistry, I think, between student and teacher does, does as well. So she was, she was living in the UK and she had, we didn't realise, she didn't realise, and I definitely didn't realise, is that she was basically being bullied by her boss.

So she came to me because her pronunciation wasn't good enough, wasn't good enough in inverted commas. And we did work on that. And also, you know, her writing skills weren't good enough and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We did loads of work. And actually with all of it, you know, it was like, I don't, you know, we can tweak this, we can tweak that, but really, and it sort of came about through talking to her and getting to know her that, that, yeah, her boss was bullying her. She didn't actually recognize it either, but you know, she was being…

constantly picked up for, you know, you didn't quite say that word right and so on. And then eventually she started applying for new jobs. She sent me her CV. I am not joking. I have never seen a CV like it. The first thing, she had a PhD. I didn't even know she had a PhD. You know, if I had a PhD, I would be doctor, you know, I wouldn't even have a first name anymore, you know.

Euan (53:40)
right okay yeah

Ellie (53:47)
And so, you know, then we were able to kind of, you know, look at her, look at her application process and take out the really sort of wishy washy language of, you know, oh, I have some experience. No, you don't have some experience. You are an expert. And just sort of sorting out pronunciation in the sense that no embarrassing mistakes or, you know, like…

Euan (54:05)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (54:14)
or basic mistakes like work and walk, we always have to sort those ones out. So we sort those out that with her, but also then just giving her the confidence to sell herself an interview. And it was absolutely fabulous. It was so good because she then went on and she got this really, you know, this job with so much more responsibility, so much more pay, so much more autonomy and respect and everything that you want from a job. And it was just literally because, you know, she hadn't realized that she was.

Euan (54:38)
Mm -hmm.

Ellie (54:42)
that she was being bullied basically by her manager. So that was a really sort of early one actually that was really good. But I've had loads, I've had loads where people have come and they've stayed a long time and had this real transformation and being able to then go on and get the jobs that they want and all of it is great. It's such a satisfying.

job this one actually really really satisfying.

Euan (55:16)
And it honestly comes across from every word that you say and from this interview that you've got a real joy in what you do. And I think that's infectious. And I really do think people are going to be inspired by that. But finally, talking of inspiration, just quickly, and I know it's a big, big question, but when it comes to online teaching, building an audience and building that kind of rapport that you have with learners and being able to have these success stories and that kind of thing.

What advice would you give to new teachers who are listening to this and thinking, okay, this sounds like my kind of thing. This sounds like the kind of achievable goal that I could have. I've got a niche that I'm good at teaching, but it's kind of my first step. What would you say to them to kind of get them sort of on the ladder, if you like?

Ellie (56:02)
action. You just need to start. You just need to start. If you if anyone that you know has got a spare evening, they could go down to the very bottom of my Instagram account. I've never deleted anything from my Instagram account on purpose. The first videos are awful and I'm not, you know, fishing for compliments. They're really awful. And the only way that you can stop being awful is just by by doing it. So, you know, if you want to begin, you just have to

begin. And, you know, the other thing that's worth really saying with social media is it is very slow. It can take a long time to start building up any kind of momentum, any kind of audience. And, you know, I think people quit quite quickly because it is just quite tedious at the beginning. And you are, you know, you're creating this content. You know, when I first started, it took me an hour to create a video that was 60 seconds long.

And then you know five people would like it and you're like wow what did I bother but if you are serious that you are wanting to build social media presence you are wanting to to go that route you just have to keep on plodding with it and just keep on you know keep on getting better and it's not even keeping on getting better you know some of the videos that have done really well for me.

They're not necessarily great videos. They're not outstanding. They're not better than anything else. It's just the volume of it. Eventually the algorithm picks you up and you start, you start getting seen. Just do it. Just, just, just get on with it really. Just start.

Euan (57:46)
really think of a better way to end the podcast than that. So Ellie Colwell Casey, thank you so much for talking to us. Where can people find you?

Ellie (57:52)
Yeah, so you can come and join me on Instagram. I am at Ellie English teacher all one word I am beginning to build up a YouTube channel, which is still quite small, but you can come and join me over there I'm Ellie English over there or on my website www .ellieenglish .uk

Euan (58:09)
Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It's been an absolute joy speaking to you.

Ellie (58:12)
Fabulous, thank you for having me.