Taylored to perfection (The English English Podcas

Teachers from Taylor School, an English school in Oviedo in Asturias, Spain, sit down together and talk, and the talk is the whole point. The conversations are aimed at people with intermediate or advanced English who want listening practice, and they sound like colleagues chatting, not a lesson being read aloud. Speakers hesitate, restart sentences and wander onto tangents. Each episode takes a single theme. Across titles such as 'Money Podcast', 'Science', 'Technology', 'Star Wars vs. Star Trek', 'Rob Taylor - Adventure Camera Operator' and 'Words of the year 2024', the vocabulary swings from banks and income tax to black holes, WhatsApp, freelance work and Death Stars. The structure is simple and useful. In several episodes the presenter says at the start that a list of difficult words has been prepared, points listeners to it on the school website, and promises to explain those words once the conversation is over. The money episode keeps that promise, ending with a plain definition of tax as a percentage of income that goes to the government. Words also get explained in the middle of the talk. Rob Taylor, talking about his life as a camera operator, says most jobs in his field are freelance, and the conversation pauses to establish that freelance means self-employed. He describes starting as a runner who made tea, delivered things in a van and cleaned up after people, then slowly working his way up through camera assistant jobs. Different teachers take turns presenting: John leads the science programme and Beth leads the technology one, with colleagues as guests. 'Science' ends with a quiz John sets for the others, who warn in advance that it will show how shaky their basic science is. Before that, the talk touches on A Brief History of Time, how readable it is, and the idea that black holes give off radiation. The technology conversation compares a time when getting online in Australia in 1999 was expensive with today's habit of arranging to meet at the last minute. Money gets a similar treatment, including a discussion of young people in Spain living with their parents and whether that is more economic than cultural, with Liz Wyke offering a comparison with the UK. Pop culture gets room too, as the Star Wars conversation jokes about bigger Death Stars being built again and again and imagines the planning meeting behind them. 'Words of the year 2024', led by Dave Taylor with David Buchanan, starts from the word of the year that Oxford University Press announces annually and distinguishes canon, set from the top by a story's writers, from a looser, folklore-like body of background knowledge. The goodbye teases the guest with some of the year's slang, 'goated' and 'demure' included. Some episodes close with an invitation to take classes at the school in person or over Skype.