Decide what to delegate.
Every act of delegation costs something evidential, and the interface never itemizes the bill. The Proficiency Arc traces the movement from procuring output to informed refusal and scheduled reconsideration.
For English language teachers, teacher educators, and the people who train them
The English is good.That is where the professional question starts.
Beyond the Fluent Surface: Professional Judgment and AI in English Language Teaching. A working account of what generated fluency can and cannot evidence, and what a teacher does about it on a Tuesday.
Generative systems have not made fluency worthless. They have severed it from its producer. Treat that as a cheating problem and you will spend the year policing; treat it as an evidence problem and it changes how you assess, design, and protect professional judgment.
The professional question is no longer only “Is this good English?” It is also “What does this English warrant me in concluding?”
Chapter 1, When Fluency Is No Longer Enough01 / The argument
MachineoutputTeacher
judgment
The machine can have the sediment.
The scales stay with the teacher.
A working sequence
Four jobs, worked through in order
Behind every chapter is one governing claim: AI can reduce a teacher’s labor while quietly consuming the judgment that makes that labor professionally valuable.
Compression is not abdication, but the two are quite easy to confuse from the inside, and nothing in the interface distinguishes them for you.
Interrogate what comes back.
Fluent, plausible, and adequate are three different findings. The CAGE Protocol gives four checks a working teacher can actually run: Cutoff, Admission, Governance, Evidence.
Protect what crosses the boundary.
Learner data, protected material, institutional exposure, freelance exposure, and the widening gap between pasting text into a chat window and granting a system the ability to act.
Preserve the effort that forms expertise.
The chapters on deskilling and guardrails deal with the part nobody markets: the work that made you good at this was often the work you would now be glad to hand over.
02 / Terms of engagement
Read this before you buy it
Supply prompt recipes with a shelf life measured in months
Supply decision procedures that survive the next model release
Catalog tools
Interrogate categories of tool behavior, and say when the answer is no
Argue that teachers should adopt AI
Treat adoption and refusal as professional decisions requiring evidence
Present classroom trials it has not run
State the evidential status of its claims, including the weak ones
Promise time savings
Ask what the saved time was previously buying you
Where the evidence is thin, contradictory, or unavailable, the book says so. Stylistic confidence disguising evidential uncertainty is the failure it spends eleven chapters describing, so committing it would be a very strange way to finish.
03 / Inside the book
Contents
Four parts. Eleven chapters. A glossary, full references, and a note on how AI was used in the making of the book.
When Fluency Is No Longer Enough
Why fluent output is insufficient rather than worthless, and why ELT faces a distinctive evidence problem.
Calibrating the Promise
Separating measured findings from extrapolation, historical hype, product claims, and professional inference.
The Proficiency Arc
From output procurement to specification, evaluation, informed refusal, and scheduled reconsideration.
“Back to the teacher at the kitchen table, and one changed decision.”
04 / The reader
Written for the person who has to decide
The classroom teacher
You are already using these systems, or already refusing to, and in both cases without much to reason from. The decision has to be defensible on Monday. It also has to be cheap enough to survive your actual week.
The teacher educator
You are being asked to teach AI literacy before the field has agreed what it consists of. This book separates operating a system from diagnosing what its output warrants.
The academic manager or DoS
You are writing policy that will be read as permission or prohibition, and neither is what you mean. Start with the chapters on assessment, the perimeter, and guardrails.
06 / Method
The book discloses its own method
Beyond the Fluent Surface carries a full account of how AI was used to research, brief, audit, and draft it, with the boundaries stated and the limits named. A book that asks teachers to interrogate their tools has no standing to be vague about its own.
07 / Early readers
Endorsements
“A beautifully grounded and essential read...”Erdeşin Doğu, ESL Instructor & Children's Book Author
“The distinction ... between maintaining an existing skill and having the opportunity to form it in the first place was one of the strongest parts of the book for me.”Raffaella Manzo, Teacher Trainer and Founder of ProTEFL Institute
“...teachers are capable of judgment. [This book] gives them structured frameworks to exercise that judgment, and then takes seriously the possibility that the conditions of their work might erode that.”Ruairi Braddell, ELT Editor
Kate Bodrova
Founder and CEO, AMAZY
08 / The Foreword
Read the Foreword by Kate Bodrova
Kate Bodrova is the founder and CEO of AMAZY. She spent ten years in the classroom before founding it, and built the platform she wished she'd had: an AI-powered space for creating interactive lessons, sharing materials, assigning work to students and tracking their progress over time. AMAZY was named Best EdTech Startup in Europe at EdTechX 2024 and has been supported by UCL EdTech Labs and the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation. She lives in Brighton, UK.
09 / Opening the book
Read the Introduction
A personal account of relief, scrutiny, and the work that formed the book’s central question.
10 / Continue the work
CPD materials for the book
The companion CPD strand translates the book's professional checks into adaptable trainer-led sessions. It includes a master guide, session materials, trainer notes, and a clear account of the constraints that keep the work focused on judgment rather than tool training.
Access is password protected. The password appears in every edition of the book.
Access the CPD materials11 / Press and media
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Beyond the Fluent Surface
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