Scott Thornbury
About
About
Who is he?
Originally from New Zealand, Scott Thornbury graduated from Reading University (UK) with a Master’s degree in TEFL. Having worked in both the UK and Egypt, he moved to Barcelona, where he has been based for many years.
Professional life
From 2007 to 2020, Scott Thornbury designed and taught a Masters in TESOL at the New School in New York and was Academic Director at the International Teacher Development Institute. He is in high demand as a conference speaker and travels extensively to give workshops and presentations. He is a trustee for the Hands Up Project, which promotes drama activities in English for children in under-resourced regions of the Arab world. Recently, he has been working for Mosaik Education, training teachers of refugees in the Middle East in how to integrate communicative activities into their online classes.
Scott’s writing credits include a range of books for teachers on language and methodology, two of which, Natural Grammar and Teaching Unplugged were awarded a British Council ELTons award (source) for innovation in English Language Teaching. He is also the editor for the Handbooks for Language Teachers series for Cambridge University Press.
Scott Thornbury is well known across the ELT world for his clarity of thought and his ability to express those thoughts clearly and succinctly to his readers and listeners. His approach is not one of ‘out of the box’ but ‘why have boxes at all?’ and his focus has been on devising strategies and activities that generate real communication both with and between learners. He is perhaps best known, along with Luke Meddings, for ‘Teaching Unplugged’, an approach to learning built on the idea that students bring everything they need with them for a language class and the teacher provides the scaffolding, monitoring, correction and feedback that encourage engagement and progress. The idea is based on the Dogme school of film making in which only things found at a location or in the landscape are used; nothing else is brought in from outside. This materials-light approach has been seen by some as being ‘anti-coursebook’, while others see it as ‘coursebook plus’. In his own words words his beliefs are:
“For most of my career I have been committed to the view that, in contrast to the current default paradigm, second language learning is not the incremental accumulation of ‘bytes’ of grammar by an information-processing brain. Rather, it is a social and embodied (i.e. not purely cognitive) endeavour, involving the whole person as they align with, and co-adapt to, their target discourse community. In this sense, I draw on humanistic perspectives of learning, as well as socially-situated, usage-based and ecological ones. Classroom activity, I believe, should engage the whole person, and should be predicated on the meanings and purposes that the learners bring to the class, with the teacher’s interventions serving to shape the raw material in ways that instantiate the learners’ needs.”
Biographical source
Social Profiles
Place in HLT
From 2007 to 2020, Scott Thornbury designed and taught a Masters in TESOL at the New School in New York and was Academic Director at the International Teacher Development Institute. He is in high demand as a conference speaker and travels extensively to give workshops and presentations. He is a trustee for the Hands Up Project, which promotes drama activities in English for children in under-resourced regions of the Arab world. Recently, he was working for Mosaik Education, training teachers of refugees in the Middle East in how to integrate communicative activities into their online classes.
