About this ebook
About the author
James Goddard is a language educator and writer with over fifteen years of experience teaching English to speakers of other languages across four countries. He holds a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham, where his research focused on incidental vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading.
Goddard began his career teaching English in rural Japan, where he observed that students who learned vocabulary through reading and conversation consistently outperformed those who relied on memorization-based study methods. This observation led him to question the effectiveness of traditional vocabulary instruction and eventually to develop the approach outlined in this book.
He has taught at universities and language institutes in Japan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, working with learners from over thirty language backgrounds. His students have ranged from absolute beginners to advanced academics preparing for publication in English-language journals. This breadth of experience has shaped his conviction that natural acquisition methods work for learners at every level and in every context.
Goddard's writing on language learning has appeared in *English Teaching Professional*, *Modern English Teacher*, and the *Journal of Second Language Acquisition*. He has also developed training materials for language teachers and speaks regularly at conferences on the topics of vocabulary acquisition and extensive reading.
He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he works as a curriculum consultant and continues to research how learners can build lasting language proficiency without the burnout that so often accompanies formal study. When not thinking about words, he can be found hiking in the Pentland Hills with a novel in his bag, preferably one he has not read before.
