Unplugged was born from the experience of its US-born founder, Ethan Spooner. During school and university, he had great difficulty learning languages and came to believe that he lacked the ability to do so. This greatly impacted his future causing him to switch from studying Political Philosophy, where learning a second language was mandatory, to studying Architecture, where it was not.

After finishing college, Ethan had the opportunity to live in Spain for six months, where he quickly learned Spanish by using it in everyday life. He discovered that languages are learned orally with motivation, in real situations, and with academic support to resolve any doubts he had.

In 2010, Ethan began teaching English at an academy in Jaén. He applied what he had learned: motivating his students, creating close relationships, and using the language in real-life situations, with vocabulary and grammar support so that students could communicate in those situations. He saw how his groups progressed faster than the rest of the academy, which inspired him to found English Unplugged Jaén in 2011. Since then, the project has grown with a team of committed teachers who continue to apply these ideas today.

At the same time Ethan began teaching English, he applied the same teaching techniques to promote reading and writing among teenagers in Jaén. Together with Marie Carmen Molina, he founded Proyecto Slam and co-founded Slam España, a federation of local poetry recitals.

Between 2010 and 2020, Proyecto Slam held four creative writing workshops each year for approximately 1,000 students as part of their compulsory language and literature classes. In addition, they published a video book and two magazines in collaboration with the José Nogué School of Fine Arts, and held numerous recitals focused on the participation of teenagers. The project served as a model for the implementation of similar workshops in numerous cities throughout Spain.

In 2021, while searching for techniques to help the academy's students improve their reading comprehension, Ethan came across the National Reading Panel report, which identified five key components of literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

He also discovered that the difficulties he had experienced in learning another language were not solely due to traditional methodology—the grammar-translation method, widely used in schools in Spain—but were related to symptoms of dyslexia: slow reading and writing with persistent errors, short-term memory problems, and difficulty learning foreign languages. He realized that the tools needed to help students improve their reading comprehension were the same ones used to teach people with dyslexia to read and write correctly.

He researched how to incorporate the recommendations of the National Reading Panel into the academy's methodology and found the Orton-Gillingham approach, which offers the flexibility needed to work on these skills with students who are learning English. Since then, he has continued to train in reading techniques and their implementation at English Unplugged.

At English Unplugged, we believe that anyone can learn a language with the right approach, motivation, and support. Our history, personal experiences, and the results we have achieved together with our students reinforce our conviction that learning should be meaningful, human, and based on scientific evidence.

We don't just teach English: we accompany our students on a journey of personal and intellectual growth that broadens their opportunities and strengthens their self-confidence.