To all practitioners

Jane Willis

Books

Teaching English Through English.

Jane Willis

1982, London: Longman. (source)

The Collins COBUILD English Course.

Jane Willis, Dave Willis

1988, Honely: Collins. (source)

A Framework for Task-based.

Jane Willis

1996, London: Longman. (source)

Challenge and Change in Language Teaching.

Jane Willis, Dave Willis

1996, Oxford: Macmillan. (source)

English for Primary Teachers.

Mary Slattery, Jane Willis

2004, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (source)

Task-based Instruction in Foreign Language Education: Practices and Programs.

Betty Lou Leaver, Jane Willis

2004, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. (source)

Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching.

Corony Edwards, Jane Willis

2005, Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan. British Council ELT Innovations (ELTons) Award 2006. (source)

Doing Task-based Teaching.

Dave Willis, Jane Willis

2007, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shortlisted for the Ben Warren Prize 2007. (source)

English Through Music.

Anice Paterson, Jane Willis

2008, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (source)

Winning the Grammar Wars – What Grammar Really is and How we Use It.

Dave Willis, Jane Willis

2015, Willis-elt. (source)

Jane Willis

Recommended books

Towards an Analysis of Discourse

John McHardy Sinclair, Malcolm Coulthard

1975, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (source)

Sinclair and Coulthard’s research into the English used by teachers and pupils led me to research the language of TEFL classrooms, where I found very controlled teacher talk and hardly any instances of meaning-focused learner talk. Learners were getting a very impoverished experience of English in everyday use and little chance to communicate freely.

Memory, Meaning and Method: Some Psychological Perspectives on Language Learning

Earl W. Stevick

1976, Rowley MA: Newbury House. (source)

The book that really started me thinking about how to teach

Second Language Pedagogy

N. S. Prabhu

1987, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (source)

The person who introduced me to TBLT was N. S. Prabhu in 1983, who later reported his research in this book. The COBUILD project started us thinking about what we should be teaching, and the importance of words and their collocations. [See Dave Willis. 1990. The Lexical Syllabus Honely: Collins ELT, available free at www.birmingham.ac.uk › lexical-syllabus]

Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching

Willis D

2003, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (source)

Represents an amalgamation of all the above and demonstrates how TBLT – a meaning-focused approach – can incorporate a focus on form.

Place in HLT

While I was delighted to be asked to contribute a paragraph “to encapsulate Jane Willis’s relationship to HLT in her work, particularly with respect to TBLT”, the request created a dilemma. I’ve never been able to see the unique contribution of Jane and Dave to TBLT as anything other than a partnership, and so my comment here is applicable to both. One aspect of the Willises’ approach to TBLT that resonates with HLT is its emphasis on the concept of the resourceful learner. Too often, whether consciously or not, we project a deficit view of our learners, reminding them what they can’t do. Jane and Dave’s approach challenges the deficit view that TBLT exceeds lower-proficiency learners’ resources. They demonstrate that by collaboratively drawing on and pooling all their semiotic resources, learners can rise to the communicative challenges posed by TBLT.

— David Nunan

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