Charles Goodger Bio

Born in London the founder of FunSongs has a degree in modern languages from London University and an International House TEFL certificate. He has indefinite tenure as a part-time Collaboratore Esperto Linguistico at  Bologna University in Italy from where he has taken several years unpaid leave to dedicate himself to writing action songs and study material for FunSongs and developing the FunSongs bilingual puppet shows. He lives with his Italian wife and ten-year-old son in Riga, Latvia.
Charles Goodger is an English teacher, text-book writer (his books include World Friends, Longman and The Language of Travel, Mondadori) and teacher trainer. He has held many courses and seminars for the Italian and Latvian Ministries of Education.

Charles is also a professional musician and entertainer and has worked as a singer, pianist and guitarist in many countries. You can find out more about how he put together his interests in music and language learning by reading Chapter One of  the free PDF book Music and Mime, Rhythm and Rhyme.

Since establishing FunSongs, Charles has been a plenary speaker at a number of international ELT conferences, and has conducted workshops and seminars in Lithuania, Russia, Latvia, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and England where he  worked together with Mario Rinvolucri at Pilgrims Teacher Training Centre in Canterbury in 2000.  

"I'm really glad I studied languages. Being able to speak French, Italian, Spanish, German and now some Latvian has made relations with "foreign" people so much richer and less superficial. Of course in the globalising 21st century a proper grounding in English is part of the new literacy but that doesn't mean English native speakers can assume they can get by without learning other languages and experiencing other cultures."