English teaching since 1985•Portland, Oregon•Active classroom practitioner
I coach professionals one-on-one and build custom English content for companies, schools, and platforms — grounded in 40 years of teaching and content development.
Currently teaching daily at Portland English Language Academy
Whether you’re one learner or a whole platform, the approach is the same: content built from real teaching practice, produced with modern AI workflows, and verified by a practitioner with 40 years of teaching and content development behind him.
Sessions built around your specific goals — the English of your profession, preparation for a new role, or becoming a more confident, fluent speaker. You set the agenda, and every session is individually prepared for what will be most useful to you right now.
I also consult. Teachers and trainers who want to bring these methods into their own work, and HR teams working out how to meet an English-training mandate — start with the same conversation.
Custom learning materials for corporations, language schools, and EdTech platforms — full course packages, unit series, or targeted materials for a specific learner population.
Every build is CEFR-calibrated and grounded in classroom practice, not theory. AI does the drafting; four decades of teaching judgment does the verification — so you get content that’s precise for your industry and actually works with your learners.
My career has been practical from the start: for 40 years I’ve been the one brought in to build English materials that actually ship — on whatever platform was emerging at the time. Early websites, online courses, DVDs, smartphones. Every new wave of digital distribution needed content that worked, delivered on real timelines, and turning that around became my trade. AI is the biggest shift yet — and the first one that lets the work go all the way to the individualized level.
Every build starts with the same questions: Why are we focusing on English? Who is the audience? Do your teams need the jargon of your industry — and how it’s actually used in day-to-day interactions? That last one is the hard problem.
There are excellent materials for English in Healthcare or English for Aviation. But materials for an engineer discussing slurry compounds with international colleagues? Those didn’t exist — so I built them. I’ll be honest: I knew nothing about ceramic slurries before developing that course for a supplier to the semiconductor industry. AI put the technical knowledge on the table. Forty years of teaching told me, on every line, whether the English around it was right — and whether it was pitched at a level learners could genuinely use. And then, in our sessions, the roles reversed: my learners taught me their profession, explaining the processes and the details in their own developing English.
Best of all, I can build directly from your materials — your documents, your style guides, your terminology, the way your company actually writes and speaks. Even a small sample of non-sensitive, public-facing material is enough to shape the outcome. The result is your company’s English, taught deliberately — with materials built to strict CEFR level standards in your context, so learners are always on task and practicing the language they’ll actually use. New hires and global team members learn to communicate the way your best people already do.
Specialized to your industry. Matched to your culture. Verified by human teaching judgment at every step.
English courses and lesson builds grounded in real workplaces, real stories, and real learner needs. Each piece here started in the classroom — built for real workplaces, then refined until it teaches the way learners actually need.
For: customer-facing engineers and corporate liaisons in semiconductor equipment and ceramic components who work with global clients.
A complete interactive training environment: industry glossary, functional phrases, and scenario practice — plus live AI tools where learners rehearse real negotiations, check their register against professional norms, and train pronunciation with instant feedback.
For: international professionals and advanced learners who need to understand and talk about startup culture, funding, and product pitches.
A narrative-based unit set in an Austin startup that builds comprehension of pitch meetings, key jargon such as runway, burn rate, MVP, and traction, as well as the cultural norms of startup communication.
Preview chapter →
For: engineers and quality professionals in semiconductor ceramics who need to describe problems, defects, and corrective actions in English.
A case-study lesson on a quality control failure that develops technical vocabulary such as batch variability, tolerance threshold, root cause, and corrective action — with structured practice explaining what happened, why, and what happens next.
View sample lesson →
Kenneth Beare has been helping learners move from textbook English to the real language of the workplace since the mid-1980s. He has taught in Germany, Italy, New York City, and Portland — and he’s made the journey his learners are on, twice, becoming fluent first in German and then in Italian to live and work in each country. He is currently teaching daily at Portland English Language Academy — if you’re in Portland, you can study with Kenneth at PELA.
From 1997 to 2017, he ran one of the internet’s most widely read ESL resources through About.com and ThoughtCo — for years a New York Times Company property. Client work has ranged from course development for Global English/Pearson to online English courses for incoming University of Florence students (with Scala Group) and English content for the Italian newsweeklies Panorama and L’Espresso.
Every course and lesson build on this site grows out of that experience: teaching, publishing, and staying close to what learners actually need.
40 years
teaching and developing, and counting
3 languages
lived and worked in — English, German, Italian
20 years
running ESL at About.com & ThoughtCo
If you’re looking for one-on-one coaching, custom English content, or a tailored course build for your learners, I’d be glad to hear more about what you have in mind.
The best first step is a short message with a few details about your goals, your learners, or the kind of content you need — and I’ll get back to you soon.