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Dr Gianfranco Conti biography
Founder, owner and CEO of the leading language learning website The Language Gym, Dr Gianfranco Conti is an applied linguistics MA and PhD graduate who has taught Modern Languages for nearly 30 years at primary, secondary and university levels.
Dr Conti has researched the impact of metacognitive strategies training and error correction on L2 essay writing under the supervision of Oxford University Professor Ernesto Macaro, both during his PhD and a large-scale project in English comprehensive schools documented in Professor Macaro's 2001 book. In his current role as Visiting Fellow at the University of Reading, he has lexicogrammar acquisition, listening instruction, metacognition, error correction and learner autonomy as his main research interests.
In his previous roles of head of languages at various schools in England and abroad, Dr Conti developed and implemented his instructional approach (Extensive Processing Instruction E.P.I). He is currently a renowned and popular conference speaker and CPD provider who is very active in the UK, South-East Asia, Middle East and Australia.
Dr Conti's mission make current Cognitive Science and Applied Linguistics research available to the busy classroom practitioner and to translate it in implementable and impactful instructional strategies which make languages accessible for all.
Dr Gianfranco Conti
Extensive Processing instruction (E.P.I.) approach
Dr Conti is well-known internationally for his teaching resources that have won him the TES Best contributor award and have been downloaded over
Gianfranco is also a prolific book writer. In the last five years he has co-authored with Steve Smith the best-selling handbooks for MFL professionals, ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’, ‘Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen’ and 'Memory: what every language teacher should know. His most popular book, "Breaking the sound barrier", lays out the principles of the EPI approach.
He has also published the best-selling 'Sentence Builders' series of workbooks aimed at classroom and independent learning for beginner to intermediate learners of Spanish, French, German and Italian, based on 'EPI', co-authored with his former colleague Dylan Viñales, which has been currently adapted to Irish, Welsh, Dutch and other languages. He is also currently working on a series of revision books aimed at GCSE Modern Language learners, two of which have already been published, whilst German and Italian are still in the works.
Finally, he runs an influential blog on MFL pedagogy, The Language Gym (gianfrancoconti.com), which has won him several international awards.
Teachers as Co-Learners program endorsement
The TCL program embeds the E.P.I. approach in its curriculum design, in alignment with the Victorian Curriculum, and is endorsed by Dr Gianfranco Conti.
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