English Language Advisory Group members

Steve is Chief International Officer at the Regent Group UK. He was formerly the Chair of English UK, the national association of accredited English Language centres in the UK, and a Managing Director of the British Study Centres Group looking after Transnational Education and University Pathways. He has worked in the ELT industry for over 25 years as a school owner, for private higher education, and in the profit and not-for-profit private ELT sector. He is TEFLQ (Cambridge DELTA) and is a Fellow at the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Sue Garton is Professor of Applied Linguistics (TESOL) at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. She has been an English language teacher and teacher educator for nearly 40 years, working with teachers from all over the world. She has worked on a number of Erasmus+ and British Council funded projects on teaching young learners, CLIL and EME.  She has published widely in the area of TESOL including The Routledge Handbook of Teaching English to Young Learners and is co-series editor of the 15-volume International Perspectives in ELT series, published by Palgrave Macmillan (both with Fiona Copland). Her research interests are in language teacher education, teaching young learners and classroom discourse.

Thom Kiddle is Director at Norwich Institute for Language Education (NILE), where he has worked since 2011. Previously, he was head of academic research and educational technology at the Chilean-British University in Santiago, and worked in Portugal, the UK, Australia and Thailand in language teaching, teacher training and language assessment.

He has a Master’s degree in Language Testing from Lancaster University and the Cambridge DELTA, and his role at NILE involves strategic and organisational leadership, and training and consultancy in a range of areas including the CEFR, testing and assessment, learning technologies, and language teaching methodology.

Thom is also Chair of the Eaquals Board of Trustees, and treasurer and founding director of AQUEDUTO – the Association for Quality Education and Training Online.

He has published in Applied Linguistics, Language Assessment Quarterly and System journals; in 2019, two chapters in Routledge Handbooks of Language Teacher Education; and has two forthcoming publications on Quality Assurance and Digital Language Teaching Materials in 2023. Thom was also a plenary speaker at IATEFL 2021.

Dr Tony Capstick is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at University of Reading, UK. His main areas of interest are teacher education, multilingualism and migration. He co-authored the British Council's Language for Resilience research and the Migrants and refugees in education: A toolkit for teachers MOOC which help educators and policymakers better understand the language in education needs of refugees in the Middle East. He continues to write about the language and education needs of teachers and learners in low-resource settings such as Pakistan. His textbook Language and Migration was published by Routledge in 2021