Leo Gomez and Andrew Woodbury run Learn Your English, known to many teachers simply as LYE. It started as a way to teach English to learners. Today it is a home for teachers and tutors: a newsletter, the Teacher Talking Time podcast, courses and mentoring for teachers who want to teach better, or build a teaching business of their own.
The name came from Leo. “The idea wasn’t just to learn English,” he says. “It was to learn your English.” People need a language for different reasons, so the learning should fit theirs. They sat down with Pensight CEO Yuki to talk about their course Teaching Listening Made Easy, why so many listening lessons fall flat, and what they tell teachers who want to start a business.
From the classroom to their own business
Leo and Andrew built LYE out of their own careers. Together with a former partner, Mike, who later became a tenured professor in Japan, they shared an interest in reactive, materials-light teaching. Their first pivot was professional development for teachers, using research on how people actually acquire languages. Later they added business support for independent tutors and freelance teachers.
Their biggest decision was to leave their university teaching jobs. They didn’t go all in on the business right away. They moved to a different institution that left them enough time to build it. “It was a bit of a leap of faith, and we didn’t know what we were doing,” Leo says. “We had to learn by doing, by failing, by making lots of mistakes.”
That is now how they coach. For teachers in schools, the goal is more confidence and autonomy to respond to the learners in front of them. For independent tutors, it is getting a business launched within six months. And the biggest thing holding tutors back, Leo says, is fear of making decisions. “They have to build that muscle. Otherwise they’re stuck in the hamster wheel forever.”
Stop testing listening, start teaching it
Teaching Listening Made Easy is for teachers who want to move away from the familiar routine: play a recording, answer comprehension questions, check the answers, move on. “Those questions show what students understood,” Leo says. “But they don’t show where understanding broke down, or what to teach next.”
A common example: students know a word when they read it, but can’t recognize it when they hear it. The course teaches how to work with the things that make familiar language hard to hear in natural speech, such as linking, reduced sounds and word boundaries. Spoken English, as Leo puts it, is messy.
The course is built on the research of John Field, one of the most influential figures in the study of listening. Andrew estimates that about 80% of it also applies to teaching reading.
The sooner you make a choice, the sooner you can make an adjustment.
Five red flags in a listening lesson
Asked what tells a teacher their listening lessons need work, Leo and Andrew came up with a list:
- Only course book audio. Scripted dialogues by professional actors don’t sound like real conversation, with its false starts, swallowed words and changing sounds.
- “Listen again” is your main response. If students still don’t understand after another play, you need a way to guide their attention.
- The teacher always chooses the audio. Letting learners pick a video they care about raises motivation.
- Playing the recording only once.
- Treating every problem as a vocabulary problem. Pre-teaching words doesn’t help if students can’t recognize words they already know in connected speech.
Andrew’s favorite diagnostic is transcription. On the first day of a course, he plays a clip of a fast, mumbled podcast answer and asks students to write down the first sentence. On paper, it’s simple. By ear, it isn’t. Every student transcribes it differently, which shows the teacher exactly where each one is struggling.
Inside the course
The first module is uncomfortable on purpose. “Teachers will be faced with the harsh reality that what they currently do isn’t effective,” Leo says. “They have to unlearn a lot of what they’ve learned about teaching listening.”
The next three modules walk through before, while and after listening, all built around one short TED Talk of three or four minutes. Teachers do each task themselves, then compare it with how Leo and Andrew would approach it. The point is to exploit one text in many ways instead of constantly finding new ones. Teachers can apply the same framework to whatever materials their school requires, or to any podcast, interview or video their students want. It is self-paced, and designed to be spread over several lessons, not squeezed into one.
For learners, there is also the Listening Journal: a repeatable process students can use on their own to investigate what they struggle to hear, ideally over the course of a week. The goal is independence, so students don’t always need a teacher to understand something.
What it changes for a tutor’s business
Andrew’s students often say the first class with this method gives them a headache. “But after a few weeks, 90% of the time they come up to me and say they can actually see their listening improve,” he says. For tutors, that means more specific testimonials, in students’ own words, and a research-aligned approach they can stand behind.
Leo points to a client, Jessica, who began responding to her learners’ actual difficulties, using content relevant to them, and reusing the framework instead of building a new worksheet for every recording. She then created her own course, inspired by theirs, and made it part of her business.
In their mentoring, Leo and Andrew also use the course as a model for how tutors can structure their own offers. Self-paced material can do the teaching, so live sessions are spent on interaction and feedback instead of watching videos together. “Move away from charging by the hour,” Andrew says, “and charge for the transformation.”
Why they’re building on Pensight
Learn Your English is launching its own course on Pensight. “Pensight is great,” Andrew says. “We love working with Yuki, and if you’re a tutor and you haven’t checked it out, check out Pensight. It’s new for us as well, and it’s been great so far.”
It fits the model they teach: a self-paced course doing the heavy lifting, with live time saved for real interaction, all in one place that the teacher owns.
What’s next
Leo and Andrew are refreshing the Learn Your English website, launching their course on Pensight, and lining up new Teacher Talking Time interviews with Rod Ellis, Jeremy Harmer and Chris Van den Branden.
Find Learn Your English
- Website: learnyourenglish.com
- Teacher Talking Time: https://www.youtube.com/@teachertalkingtimepodcast
- Substack newsletter: https://learnyourenglish.substack.com/
Frequently asked questions
Who are Leo Gomez and Andrew Woodbury?
Leo Gomez and Andrew Woodbury run Learn Your English (LYE), which offers professional development and business mentoring for language teachers and tutors. They also host the Teacher Talking Time podcast and created the course Teaching Listening Made Easy.
What is the difference between testing listening and teaching listening?
Testing listening means playing a recording and checking answers to comprehension questions. Teaching listening means finding out where understanding broke down, such as linking or reduced sounds, and helping students work on it. Leo and Andrew’s course is built around the second approach.
Why can students read a word but not hear it?
In natural speech, words link together, sounds disappear or change, and speakers start and stop. According to Leo, students often know every word in a transcript but can’t recognize those words in connected speech, which is why listening needs to be taught, not just tested.
Should language teachers use course book audio?
Leo sees relying only on course book audio as a red flag, because scripted dialogues don’t sound like real conversation. Teachers can use authentic podcasts, interviews and talks instead, and adjust the task rather than the recording.
What is Teaching Listening Made Easy?
Teaching Listening Made Easy is a self-paced course by Learn Your English, based on John Field’s research. It has four modules covering the problem with typical listening lessons and the before, while and after listening stages, using one short TED Talk as a model.
How can tutors move away from charging by the hour?
Andrew suggests building self-paced material that does the teaching, and using live sessions for interaction and feedback. That lets tutors charge for the transformation, not the hours, and platforms like Pensight let them host courses and sessions in one place.
Watch the full conversation between Leo, Andrew and Yuki on the Pensight podcast.
