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Ros Wright interviewed the plenary speaker Rachel Roberts about her professional background and a message she wants to pass on to the participants at the 7th English for Healthcare Conference in 11-12 September 2026 in Kraków.
After more than 30 years in the profession, I’m still fascinated by how much there is to question and rethink. ELT has changed enormously over that time, and I’m curious about how shifts in technology, working patterns and learner expectations change what good teaching looks like- and which principles still hold true despite all that change.
Robert Bjork’s work on desirable difficulties has influenced me a lot, particularly the idea that making learning feel easier doesn’t necessarily make it more effective. Scott Thornbury has also been important to me, especially his challenge to highly materials-driven teaching. His work around Dogme helped crystallise the idea that good teaching isn’t always about bringing more content into the room; often it’s about listening closely, noticing what learners are trying to do, and working with the language and communication needs that emerge there and then. Both have made me much more interested in what actually supports learning than in what makes a lesson look polished or efficient.
If access to language is no longer the problem, what problems are we actually there to solve? I think that opens up interesting questions about what learners really need from us, how specialist our work needs to be, and what the role of the teacher becomes when explanations, examples and practice are available almost instantly.
I hope they will leave seeing English for healthcare not as a small specialist corner of ELT, but as a field that may have a lot to teach the rest of the profession about where language teaching is heading.
I’d like to see a profession that becomes more specialised, more confident about the value of expertise, and less tied to the idea that bigger scale is always better. I hope we continue to make space for work that is responsive, contextualised and genuinely useful to the people we teach.
I’m very sorry that, because of a family emergency, I won’t now be able to be in Kraków in person. I was especially looking forward to returning because I lived there for a while in the mid-1990s, so it would have been lovely to revisit the city after all these years. I’m still very glad to be able to take part remotely, and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with Poland and with the EALTHY community from afar.
Rachael Roberts is a teacher educator, speaker and business mentor with more than 35 years’ experience in English language teaching. She has worked across teaching, teacher education, publishing and materials writing, and now supports freelance language professionals in building sustainable, specialised businesses.
At a time when language support is increasingly automated, instant and widely accessible, where does that leave English for Healthcare?In this plenary, Rachael Roberts explores why highly contextual, purpose-driven communication teaching may be unusually well positioned for the future. The session reflects on the growing importance of relational and deeply situated communication, and considers why this kind of expertise can be both highly valuable and surprisingly difficult to articulate or make visible from the outside.
The plenary also explores the implications this has for professional identity, sustainability and the future of specialist communication teaching.
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