Mr.Geo Sebastian

(Founder of Gio’s English)

Mr Geo Sebastian has worked continuously as an English teacher in schools in Britain for 16 years. Over this period, exposure to different learner groups has provided familiarity with the specific English problems of speakers of a wide range of other first languages, including Mandarin, Arabic, French, Malay, German, Spanish, Greek, Hindi, Malayalam, Polish, and Bantu and Nilotic African languages.

Furthermore, giving individual tutorials in the international environment of Cambridge has added insights into other major languages of the world, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, Japan, West Africa, and the Portuguese-speaking countries, which resulted in world’s first  Facebook live English classes and youtube Channel.

Constant exposure to the English grammatical weaknesses of such a wide range of learners, many informally noted down, analyzed using insights from modern Applied Linguistics, and subsequently verified through further exposure, has provided a strong intuitive appreciation of common grammatical errors in academic writing and their likely reasons – information not easily found in standard grammar books.

The main syllabus in Gio’s English App is derived from common grammar problems observed in the academic or professional output of writers whose first language is not English. Gio’s English App resulted from a need to design and teach on expository writing to international students. Gio’s English aims to meet a learner’s need that is hardly covered by most current grammar materials. The primary basis for the selection of this App’s grammar topics is personal experience: less tangible than formal research but nonetheless very valuable.

The Gio’s English App is divided into 3 Levels of roughly equal length, each translatable into a workshop lasting 90 minutes or more.
Most units deal with a particular grammatical structure, but the last few have a more functional orientation.

Each unit begins with a summary of key points and is then divided into a small number of sections containing up to ten “tasks” overall. Grammatical explanations are interspersed with the picture tasks. An effort has been made to control the length of these explanations, one strategy being to make pedagogical points through the tasks wherever possible.

Occasionally a mainstream topic cannot be narrowed down to a central learner problem, and in these cases, the supplementary strategy of seeking a picture perspective (Scooter and Pizza method) is adopted.

The target learners are adults and students who have been learning English as a secondary language for some considerable time, who are already at or close to the common entry-level for English-medium further or higher academic study, but who still wish or need to improve their use of grammar in academic or profession fulfilling.

Its aim is not only to fulfil the normal rules of grammar, through which already- recognised grammar problems can be chased up but also to help learners to identify previously- unrecognised weaknesses in their writing, which can then be worked on in the relevant places

Such learners are numerous in the educational and professional worlds and respond positively to courses and materials that seek to meet their specific needs. Learners of this kind do greatly need a standard revision of mainstream grammatical topics like articles and tenses which is covered by Gio’s English App.