UofL Alumnus Turns Language Learning into an Epic Adventure
March 19, 2025
By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences
“Rumors of madness have spread throughout the castle complex. King Olaf has had statues placed around the castle complex of the same woman with a fierce gaze and rod in hand. Only a handful of people recognize the woman, and those who do are cautious around them. Aldrich Alleninnger, the owner of the Cliffside Tavern, feels most concerned about the statues and what they represent.”
While this might sound like the plot of a fantasy movie or TV miniseries, it is in fact the basis for one story included in Language Lairs, an educational book series and conversation game developed by History and Russian alumnus Britt Singer.
Singer has been teaching English to children and adult students abroad for more than a decade. His experience working and living in Russia for three years, and now residing in Prague as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher, all began when he was a student at UofL.
“[Retired] Russian Professor Tom Dumstorf took me aside one day and said, ‘If you want to understand Russian, you have to actually go and live there.’ Teaching English as a foreign language was only supposed to be a one-year-job,” Singer said.
Now nine years after moving to Prague to continue teaching English abroad, Language Lairs allows his students to find new and creative ways to develop and refine their ability to speak English. Knowing that reading books is a great way to enhance language abilities and increase vocabulary, Singer was inspired to begin working on this program when he moved to Prague.
“One of the first things I had noticed with a majority of my private students, school students, and corporate clients is that they had been given the same book series over and over again,” Singer said. “I thought, why not try role-playing on a bigger scale? What if I could find a way to make my students more involved in the lesson, while adding a bit of chaos? If I could find a unique way to just really improvise and ask, ‘Oh, you have to go to a bank. Well, who's the bank being run by? Is it by a marauding pirate? Is it run by shady guys? Is it run by an upstanding individual?’ Or, we could create everyday scenarios of shopping and interacting with salespeople. Or, what if they need to buy a ticket for a train or an airship? I wanted to make a lesson for my students that would activate their imagination.”
Language Lairs brings fantasy and role-playing to new heights in the classroom. “This unique tabletop adventure is designed specifically for EFL teachers and their students, offering an engaging way to enhance language skills while exploring a captivating world through the characters they make and the adventures you, the teacher, bring to them,” the book description reads. The Language Lairs series and classroom structure gives Singer and other teachers the chance to act things out, be creative, and engage students in a new way. This approach also stems from his experience as a UofL student studying Russian with Dumstorf, who had asked his students at the time to assume a role for class.
"This is where the students start digging into their own vocabulary, what they want to reach for, what they want to be, or what they want to learn, and this is something I picked up from Tom when he said, ‘Everybody adopts a role for the semester.’ This just shows that if you can make the course interactive, creative, and let the students find their own avenue for learning, they are going to remember it. So, here I am with this fond memory of that semester and how powerfully memorable it was.”
Singer has seen that when students use the same book for years, they get bored. Using Language Lairs engages the imagination and allows the students to expand their skills collaboratively during an organic lesson.
“My students helped me to develop a lot of it as well, and it’s a lot of give and take,” Singer said. “I started with the basic idea of just a world. I created a map. I created a few towns, but my students and myself, we've worked together to actually build the world and the different possibilities for the adventures.”
As an American who has experienced the benefit of living in a country to refine language skills, Singer also faced the challenges of living in Russia as Vladimir Putin came to power. After three years living in Russia, he returned to Louisville briefly before choosing Prague as his next adventure. Singer encourages students today to take a moment to consider – and choose – the path that they desire in life.
“If there's something you want to do, there's always a way to do it,” Singer said. “Nowadays, I primarily work at an elementary school teaching grades four through nine. I like to give students this advice: ‘Knowing what you want to do in life is great, but knowing what you don’t want to do can be equally important.’ You don't know it right now and you're not going to figure it out right now. But if you keep working at it, eventually you will get there. It just takes five seconds of courage to say, ‘Yes - I am going to do this.’”
