About EOT
Content-based English: The Geography of Wonder
Hi, all. Welcome to English On Topic!
We live inside a language that has spent a thousand years absorbing the world, creating a fascinating linguistic landscape. For 22 years, I have walked through this landscape as an educator, watching how words build bridges. My name is Herman Louw, and my life has been a never-ending love affair with literature, pop culture, history, and the English language.
Currently based in Taipei, I spend my days teaching learners across the global digital space and in private, in-person classes. I have sat at tables with absolute beginners parsing their first verbs, and I have refined fluid nuances with advanced business students. Over two decades, a simple truth has emerged: real language learning does not happen in the sterile sequences of grammar drills or listless vocabulary tables. It happens when we confront a piece of reality—a historical event, a film choice, a modern technological wonder—and use English not as a subject to study, but as the vehicle to expand our worldly knowledge.
Currently based in Taipei, I spend my days teaching learners across the global digital space and in private, in-person classes. I have sat at tables with absolute beginners parsing their first verbs, and I have refined fluid nuances with advanced business students.
The Edge of the Page
As a traveler who left home decades ago to see the world, I’ve come to realize how language education had failed so many. For me, a personal narrative outweighs boring templates. When we focus only on the mechanics of a language, we miss the pulse of the human being using it.
On this website and throughout the companion podcast, English On Topic, we do things differently:
The limits of your language determines the limits of your world
We use content-based teaching to explore language through topics you actually care about. For instance, we might explore the dazzling vistas of science fiction, analyze key political movements of modern history, track the evolution of cinema, and parse the revelations of science, history, and philosophy. In doing so, your English skills will expand naturally. Fluency arrives through the accumulation of image, fact, and story—not through hollow memorization.
An Invitation
If you stay here a while, you will find lesson plans designed to serve learners from elementary school through adulthood, advanced learning strategies, and authentic dialogues that mimic the irregular rhythm of real thought. Try it on like a shirt. Let the language and the information wrap themselves around you, and allow yourself to think new thoughts at the edge of the imagination. You can do this both by listening to our podcast, and making use of our study materials on this site.
The world is endlessly worth attending to, and the language we use to describe it should be just as magnificent. Welcome to a different way of learning. Welcome to English On Topic.