Jane Willis
Videos & Podcasts
Videos & Podcasts
Advice for New Teachers. Jane Willis, HLT Digital 2023.
How Humanism has Influenced My Work. Jane Willis, HLT Digital 2023.
Humanism and 21st Century Skills. Jane Willis, HLT Digital 2023.
Task-based Learning. Jane Willis, HLT Digital 2023.
British Council Turkey. 2011. Interview: 1st International ELT Conference, Doğuş University, Turkey.
Podcasts
2020. Learn Your English.net. Teacher Talking Time: The Learn Yourn English Podcast (Episode 25: Jane Willis). (source)
2021. TEFL Training Institute. Doing Task Based Teaching with Young Learners (with Jane Willis). (source)
2021. TEFL Training Institute Podcast. Doing Task Based Teaching with Children (with Jane Willis). (source)
Jane Willis
Recommended books
Towards an Analysis of Discourse
John McHardy Sinclair, Malcolm Coulthard
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
The book that really started me thinking about how to teach
Second Language Pedagogy
N. S. Prabhu
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
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.
