Who is Herbert Puchta and why does he matter?

The Life

Dr Herbert Puchta has a Ph.D. in English Language Pedagogy from the University of Graz, Austria, and is currently Professor of English at the Teacher Training University in Graz as well as being a writer and international teacher trainer. He is a master practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – which he describes as “a set of techniques to model the skills of successful people and teach them to others”.

For more than two decades, he has carried out research into the practical application of findings from cognitive psychology to English Language Teaching. Herbert has co-authored numerous course books and resource books and in 2009 became President of IATEFL, the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language.

The Work

Dr Puchta has considerable experience of the classroom himself – he was a secondary school teacher for many years, before becoming a teacher trainer and then a university professor. Bilingual in English and German, he has undergone the complete process of learning languages as a student and imparting them as a teacher. He combines this perspective with his academic knowledge and practical experience to create a method that incorporates a rare degree of empathy for the learner’s state of mind, with the result that students of his materials experience enjoyment and satisfaction at many levels, as well as the primary one of learning a new language.

His innovative approach to teaching is a hallmark of his work. He was the first ELT author to base his courses on multiple intelligences theory, which proposes that children learn best when every aspect of their intelligence is stimulated using music, language, movement, logic, interpersonal skills and so on. Using his hugely popular courses such as Playway to English and English in Mind, teachers benefit, (perhaps without even knowing it), from materials based on in-depth research into how children and teenagers learn, their challenges with attention span and how their own self-image and confidence plays a crucial part in how well they learn languages.