Anupama Garg – An Educator Who Treats English Fluency as an Act of Self-Worth
Most English-learning programmes sell a transaction. You pay a fee, attend a course, walk away fluent. Anupama Garg has spent over a decade building something closer to a relationship. A relationship with language. A relationship between her and her students, that asks her adult students to slowly unlearn shame before they can confidently learn a language.
Garg holds an MA in English Literature, a Global MBA from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, and a TESOL certification from Arizona State University. She is currently working on a PGDiploma in Learning &Development, from ISTD.
But ask her what actually shapes her teaching, and her academic credentials are not where she starts. She starts with what she has watched, again and again, in adults who come to her certain they are “bad at English”. They flinch before speaking up in a meeting, they rehearse apology before a phone call, they have stayed quiet in rooms for years even though their ideas mattered.
This is precisely why Anupama refuses the industry’s favourite promise — fluency in 90 days. Her courses are deliberately structured across 6 to 9 months, built on the premise that confidence cannot be installed; it has to be grown. A grammar rule can be taught in an afternoon. The belief that one’s voice deserves to be in the room takes considerably longer to rebuild.
It is also why Garg works exclusively with adult learners. Unlike children, who absorb language without the weight of professional consequence or social judgment, her students carry real stakes into every session. They come with interviews they’ve lost, promotions they didn’t ask for, conversations they’ve avoided entirely because the language felt unsafe. Garg’s work is built around that specific adult condition: language not as an academic exercise, but as the difference between being heard and being overlooked.
What makes her classroom unusual, though, is what happens once the grammar lesson ends. Anupama’s curriculum regularly opens into conversations on financial literacy, political awareness, gender, feminism, intimacy and mental health; subjects most English courses keep firmly outside their scope. For Garg, this isn’t a generous addition. It is the actual point
Long before she was teaching English professionally, Garg was writing, under her own name and her pen name, on gender, sexuality, relationships and mental health, including authoring some of India’s earliest non-fiction books on alternative sexual lifestyles and writing candidly in Hindi on subjects most households still avoid.
That work taught her that fluency in a language means little if a person still cannot articulate a boundary, question a financial document, or speak plainly about their own needs. So, in her sessions, a discussion on sentence structure might sit beside a conversation about reading a payslip, or a vocabulary exercise might lead naturally into a discussion on consent. English, in her classroom, is the vehicle. Self-possession is the destination.
Garg has kept this work deliberately accessible. She has run free sessions over Zoom, low-fee sessions on telegram, made communities on Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram.
Her sessions happen on zoom, she shared practice material on WhatsApp, records classes for students balancing full-time jobs and families around their learning. Her approach has drawn recognition in regional media for addressing a quiet, persistent gap – adults who are entirely capable, held back not by intellect but by a language barrier compounded by limited resources and a scarcity of judgment-free spaces to learn in.
She does not measure her students’ progress by how quickly they complete a course. She measures it by what they do months later. To her what matters is whether they negotiate for themselves, whether they speak first instead of last in a meeting, whether they stop pre-apologising for their own English.
That kind of shift cannot be manufactured in 90 days. It takes consistency, patience, and a teacher willing to treat language not as a product to be sold, but as a long, deliberate act of giving someone their voice back.
Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/@englishwithanupama
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anupama-garg/
WhatsApp – +91-9950147296
Email – professional.anupama@gmail.com
