Founder, owner and CEO of the leading language learning website The Language Gym, Gianfranco is an applied linguistics MA and PhD graduate with many years of classroom experience. He has taught Modern Languages for nearly 30 years at primary, secondary and university levels.
He 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.
Formerly head of languages at various schools in England and abroad where he has developed and implemented his instructional approach (Extensive Processing Instruction), he is currently a renowned and popular conference speaker and CPD provider very active in the UK, South-East Asia, Middle East and Australia. He delivers keynotes in major international events all year around, conducts over a hundred workshops for language teachers a year and visits as many schools, either to provide professional development or to help them improve their curriculum design and delivery.
His mission is to 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.
He is well-known internationally for his teaching resources that have won him the TES Best contributor award and have been downloaded over 6,000,000 times by hundreds of thousand of teachers worldwide.
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 language teaching method he has created, E.P.I. (aka: Extensive Processing Instruction), a usage-based approach which has been adopted by thousands of language educators worldwide.
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.
His Twitter handle is @gianfrancocont9
