Books

Author Biography

Janet Olearski was born in West London, grew up in the Holland Park area and went to school in Notting Hill Gate.

She has worked extensively in educational publishing, and was the Editor of several ELT magazines including Practical English Teaching, New English Digest, The Longman Language Review, Club Magazine and TESOL Arabia Perspectives. For several years she was also Reviews Editor for BBC English Magazine. She is a member of the Panel of English Teaching Professional.

In addition to articles and short stories, she has published over thirty English language textbooks, courses and readers, amongst them That's English (BBC English/Spanish Ministry of Education), Linguaphone Children's English (Winner of the Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union Prize), Formula (Macmillan), Lifestyle (Zanichelli) - an Italian Scuola Media course book, and At Home With Italian (Reader's Digest Association) - a 16-cassette self-access language course.

For 14 years - from 1972 - Janet lived in Sicily, where she taught English Language and Literature at the University of Palermo from 1978. She later based a novel - Vows of Silence - on her experiences there.

Over the years she has conducted Teacher Development workshops and worked on ELT projects and Ministry of Education consultancies in a variety of countries including Portugal, Spain, Malta, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Finland, Croatia, Bosnia, the Philippines, Argentina, Cyprus, Indonesia, and Kenya. In 1996 and 1997, she ran a series of writers' workshops in Bali and in Nyeri, Kenya.

In 1998 she moved to Poland to join the British Council as their Young Learner Educational Consultant in Wroclaw, and to work as part of a British Council team responsible for developing a nationwide Teacher Training and Trainer Training program, providing support and guidance for a chain of regional BC libraries and Learning Resource Centres.

From Poland Janet transferred to the Middle East, to work as a textbook author within the English Language Curriculum Department of the Ministry of Education of the Sultanate of Oman. Since 2002 she has worked as Learning Enhancement Coordinator at the Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Janet has a degree in Italian and Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, where she also studied Russian and Classical Arabic. She completed her PGCE (ESOL) and her MA (TESOL) at the University of London Institute of Education.

She is a member of the Society of Authors, the National Association of Writers in Education, and the Institute of Linguists. She qualified as a certified NLP Practitioner in 1994.