Peter Beech - Center Director

Originally from England, Peter has been working in EFL in Greece since graduating from Sussex University in 1986, and for several years was director of his own school in Corinth. After completing his MSc in Teaching English in 1997, Peter established Anglo-Hellenic primarily as a teacher recruitment service, while becoming increasingly involved in teacher training. He has provided training seminars for schools throughout Greece, and since 2004 has been running TEFL certificate courses full-time year-round.

Peter also has substantial experience of university teaching. He works part time as an Associate Lecturer with the UK Open University, tutoring since 2001 on the MA in Education (Applied Linguistics), and at New York College in Athens, tutoring on the University of Greenwich BA in TESOL and MA in ELT Management.   

His academic interests are centred on ways to make teaching more effective, from initial teacher training courses through to experienced teachers studying at Master’s level. He is particularly concerned with the role of teacher as researcher and with the effective design and implementation of classroom research. His other main area of interest is the use of technology in education, and especially Computer Assisted Language Learning.

A former Board member of TESOL Greece, he was the founding coordinator of the TESOL Greece CALL SIG, and has given numerous professional presentations in this area. Peter has also given presentations throughout Greece as an invited guest speaker at events organized by PALSO, the Federation of Greek Language Schools, and QLS, the Panhellenic Association of Accredited Quality Language Schools. He is extensively involved in the Greek State Certificate of Language Proficiency (KPG), primarily as a trainer of oral examiners.

Peter is an active member of IATEFL, the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language and of the Teacher Trainers and Educators SIG. He has presented numerous times at the annual IATEFL conference in the UK and has published several articles in the IATEFL conference selections. He has also published extensively in Greek ELT publications such as ELT News and the TESOL Greece Newsletter.

Sylvia Karastathi – Lead Trainer

Sylvia Karastathi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of English Language and Literature of the University of Bern, Switzerland. In 2010 she was awarded her doctoral degree from the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge, where she worked on a thesis which mapped the intersections between British women’s writing and the visual arts at the turn of the 21st century. She has previously earned an MA in Modern Literature and Culture from the University of York, UK and a BA in English from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include Digital Humanities with a particular focus on ICT resources and teaching tools, while she has gained experience in the field working with the Intermedia Research Group at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge. In 2011 she taught at New York College Athens a course on ‘ICT in Language Learning’ for the MA in Management of Language Learning. She has gained significant teaching experienced as a full-time EFL tutor in Greece and as an undergraduate tutor and dissertation supervisor in the UK.