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About the author
James Schleicher has spent over fifteen years teaching English as a second language across three continents. He began his career in a small language academy in Guadalajara, Mexico, working evenings with adult learners who had spent all day in factories and markets and showed up to class tired but determined. That experience shaped his entire approach to language teaching: respect the learner's time, focus on what is immediately useful, and never confuse grammatical knowledge with communicative ability.
After Mexico, James moved to South Korea, where he taught at a university in Daejeon for four years. There he worked primarily with intermediate learners — students who had studied English for six to ten years but could still freeze when asked a simple question by a foreigner. He developed a classroom methodology centered on conversation routines: structured, repeatable patterns that gave students a framework they could rely on when anxiety spiked. The results were consistent enough that he began training other teachers in the same approach.
In 2018, James returned to the United States and founded the English Fluency Lab, an online school that provides one-on-one conversation coaching for intermediate learners worldwide. The school serves students from over thirty countries, with a particular focus on professionals in tech, healthcare, and hospitality — fields where English proficiency directly affects career mobility. James continues to coach students personally and uses those real coaching sessions as the foundation for his writing. Every dialogue in this book, or one very much like it, has happened in his classroom.
James holds a Master's degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from the University of Oregon and a Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) from Cambridge University. He has presented at TESOL International Conventions in Denver, Seattle, and Houston on topics including fluency development, the affective filter in adult learners, and structured conversation practice for intermediate students.
He now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two children. He speaks Spanish as a second language and is learning Korean, which means he still experiences the same frustrations his students face — searching for words, making errors, and pushing through the awkwardness of being an imperfect speaker. He believes this is an advantage. A teacher who has never struggled to learn a language, he says, is like a doctor who has never been sick. They may know the theory, but they miss the experience.
*Everyday English: Speak with Confidence* is his second book. His first, *English at Work: Essential Language for the Global Workplace*, was published in 2021 and is used as a supplementary text in business English programs at three universities in Japan and two in Brazil.
