My name is Dave Willis. I have been involved in English Language teaching since I started work in Ghana, West Africa, in 1963. So that's forty-five years now, and I'm still enjoying it. My wife, Jane, is also involved in ELT. We have retired from full time work, so we no longer do a five to nine job, but we do a lot of work together as writers and teacher educators. It keeps us in touch with friends and colleagues and enables us to travel to run courses and take part in conferences all over the world. You can get an idea of the kind of work we do from our website www.willis-elt.co.uk.
We now live in the north-west of England in Kendal in the English Lake District. It's a wonderful part of the country with mountains and lakes - superb walking country. We live in an old house which has an unusual name. From 1864 to 1966 it was the local pub called The Hyena, and it has kept the name. You can find out about The Hyena and the Lake District from our website www.willis-elt.co.uk/homelink.
We came to the Lake District because we love walking and that's how we spend a lot of our time. I also play golf fairly regularly and very badly. And we belong to a singing group called Lakeland Voice (www.lakelandvoice.co.uk). We sing regularly once a week. In the long summer evenings we go as a group on singing walks. We walk through magnificent countryside and sing on the mountains, in the woods, by rivers and, best of all, in caves, where the acoustics are magnificent, and our voices echo round when we finish a song.
The best thing about living in Kendal is that our daughters, Jenny and Becky also live here with their families, so we get to spend a lot of time with our five grandchildren aged from ten to two.
We've been very lucky in our working life. Since Ghana we've worked in Cyprus, Iran and Singapore as well as the UK. We have made good friends everywhere. The TEFL world is very welcoming and inclusive. We've also seen history in the making. We were in Ghana in 1966, when the then president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown by a coup d'etat. We were in Iran in 1978 when civil unrest led up to the overthrow of the Shah and the return from exile of Ayatollah Khomeini in January 1979. When our daughter Jenny was reading politics at university the class was asked ‘Have you heard of the Iranian revolution?' ‘Yes,' said Jenny. ‘I was there.' And so she was. Even though she was only eight at the time. She and Becky remember returning from school on the school bus, through huge demonstrations, past burning cars and buildings. I was waiting to meet them at the British Embassy in central Tehran. I have never in my life been more pleased to see anyone than I was on that day, November the 5th 1978.
I worked for the British Council for almost twenty years. In that time the Council twice sent me for training, first to Edinburgh University to do a Diploma in Applied Linguistics and then to Birmingham to do a PhD. In both Edinburgh and Birmingham I came across teachers who have influenced me ever since.
We were in Birmingham in the 1980s at a very important time in the development of English language research. Professor John Sinclair had just begun the Cobuild project. This involved building a language corpus on computer and then analysing that corpus to produce the Cobuild Dictionaries. Nowadays everyone recognises the value of computer held corpora running to many millions of words. But I feel very privileged to have been involved with corpus work from the early days.
In 1990 I left the British Council and went to the Centre for English Language Studies at Birmingham, where I worked until 2000. I was incredibly lucky in the people I worked with. My PhD supervisor, and later a colleague and close friend, was Malcolm Coulthard. Malcolm's interests range from discourse analysis to translation and forensic linguistics. Another friend and colleague at Birmingham was the late David Brazil. David did great research in developing a description of intonation and was possibly the best teacher I have ever come across. And two of the giants of modern linguistics John Sinclair and Michael Halliday had a great influence on me at Birmingham and also became good friends. John was supreme as a researcher in the vocabulary of English. Michael Halliday, a regular visitor to Birmingham, has shaped the thinking of a whole generation of grammarians.
With this fortunate background it's not surprising that I have taken a great interest in language description, both grammar and vocabulary. In 1990 I wrote The Lexical Syllabus to highlight the importance of vocabulary teaching. It was published by Collins Cobuild an is now available free on the Birmingham University website at www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resources/LexSyll. I have been involved as a co-author in the writing of two grammars for learners. In 2003 I wrote Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching which was published by Cambridge University Press. In this book I tried to show how grammar and vocabulary are very closely linked together.
For many years I have been interested in task-based learning and teaching (TBLT). In fact an approach to TBLT was central to my PhD thesis in 1983. In the late 1980s Jane and I wrote the Collins Cobuild English Course, probably the first task-based course book. It's out of print now, but has influenced quite a number of course books which are widely used today. In 2007 we co-authored Doing Task-based Teaching for Oxford University Press. This followed on from a book Jane wrote for Longman in 1996, entitled A Framework for Task-based Learning. In Doing Task-based Teaching we have tried to bring Jane's earlier book up to date and give very practical advice for teachers, drawing on our own experience and that of teachers around the world who helped us with their ideas.
In my articles on Reading for information I want to look at ways of teaching reading. It is now recognised around the world that many learners need to read English to give them access to information in a variety of settings. They want to use English as students and professional people researching on the world wide web and using specialist books to inform their studies and supplement sources in their first language. So I want to look at ways of helping learners to meet these challenges, and at ways of using their reading to help them develop their grammar and vocabulary.
Your comments and questions
During the month of April 2008 I will be the Guest Contributor. You can add comments or questions about this biography by clicking on Add new comment below. I will also be regularly visiting the site, reading your comments and answering questions.
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Hi Dave,
My name is Duanes and I am an English teacher from Brazil. My teaching was very influenced by your work (and your wife's!). I came across TBL in the beginning of my career and was fascinated by how it helped my learners. I had read your article in 'Challenge and Change' and then Jane's 'A Framework for Task-Based Learning'. Afterwards I came across Estaire and Zanon's 'Planning Classroom Work - A Task-Based Approach', Nunan's 'Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom', among others.
I am now undergoing the Cambridge DELTA and decided to focus one of my skills assignment on Task-based writing. I have been trying to find, without success, something on task-based writing. Do you have any suggestions of articles or books on this specific topic?
Many thanks in advance.
Hi Duanes,
Thanks for your question. It’s not easy to build good writing tasks into our work in the classroom.
I’d like to look at a number of questions. First, how do we learn to write. I think basically we learn to write from our reading. Reading provides us with a model for our writing. Just as we learn to speak from interacting with others, so we learn to write mainly by reading what other have written. So we need to provide a link between reading and writing.
We can do this by asking learners to recycle texts in different forms. Take the shark text that I used for my first article on this website. It might be interesting to ask learners to summarise this text in exactly eighty words. They might aim at something like this:
There are over 400 species of shark and only around 25 are dangerous to humans. Most sharks are too small to be dangerous. More than half the 400 species grow to less than a metre in length. And the biggest sharks eat only plankton and small fish. There are a few species like the bull shark and the great white which attack humans, but you are more likely to be killed by a dog or bees than by a shark.
Ask them to do a rough version for homework and then to work on it in groups in the next class. In doing this they will mine the original text for language, so this kind of writing exercise could take the place of form focus in our four stage cycle. It’s a realistic exercise in that we often do have to summarise things in writing. That’s exactly the kind of thing people do for their history or geography homework – read a chapter and write on one aspect of it. It is also linguistically demanding. One of the reasons I stipulated exactly eighty words. It’s an artificial constraint, but it will make learners think very carefully about the wording of their summaries. You could ask them to make copies of their final version and pass these round for other groups to read. Then you could show them your own version lead a class discussion on which were the most important points to include in the summary.
Perhaps a problem with this is that there is no audience and no real purpose for the summary. It’s a useful writing exercise, but not a real task. So this raises two more questions:
Let’s handle our shark topic in a slightly different way. You have a group discussion of the question Are sharks dangerous to humans? Then you have teacher led discussion which allows people to share ideas. Then instead of a written text learners hear a short lecture on sharks containing the same sort of information. This is what they are asked to do:
You are going to hear a short lecture on the subject of sharks, then you will be asked to answer the questions: Are sharks dangerous to humans? Listen carefully to the text and take notes to share with the others in your group.
Now there is a purpose for reading and an audience. They want to extract relevant information to share with the members of their group. It’s a note-taking exercise which mirrors the way we use writing in a study situation. Some of their notes may be in L1, But it is unlikely that their notes will be predominantly L1 – it’s very difficult to hear something in English, take notes in L1 and then use those notes for a discussion in English. But it doesn’t matter if there is some L1. The important thing is that they are using writing for a real purpose.
At the next stage each group is asked to write a summary along the lines suggested above. They will then exchange summaries with one of the other groups before finalising their mown summary. Now there is an audience and a purpose for writing. They are writing to inform other groups in order to help them to shape their summary.
This is one way of bringing task-based writing into the classroom. But there are many other ways. I remember working with computer games which involved problem solving. We had learners working in groups of three. Each group was paired with another group. They were allowed to communicate with one another in writing, which had to be in English. So as they worked their way through the problem they wrote to one another explaining what difficulties they had encountered and what they had discovered. They had to write with great precision to make it absolutely clear what they had found.
I think that’s enough from me. I’d like to throw things open and ask others to contribute ideas that have worked well for them in the classroom.
Hello Dave,
I'm an English teacher from China. I love teaching as my lifetime career, but I'm encountered with all sorts of problems which afflict me very much. Fortunately, however, I'm ready to keep on studying and thinking. My favorite website is www.teachingenglish.org.uk and I'm quite impressed with your articles, they give me so much inspirations on teaching. Recently I've read 《Reading for Information》《Techniques for Priming and Recycling》《Techniques for Form Focus after Reading》《Form Focus and recycling: getting grammar》. These days I've been reading 《Lexical Syllabus》. All of them present so many practical ideas that I can apply into my own classes with good effect.
Yet, I still got some questions on 《Lexical Syllabus》, needing your clarification:
1. I love the idea of exposing learners with meanings and patterns associated with the commenest words of English. But I'm afraid not all of us throughout the world have access to these commenest words. Then how can we exploit the most important words from our listening transcripts or reading texts?
2. To help learners have enough experiences of English, they are suggested to listen to or read enough authentic stuff. The problem is how can we get the corpus?
3. And it's unrealistic for us to use all of your corpus, for we're required to use the books designated by the school. So the thing is how can I apply the ideas to our real teaching? Could you please give me some practical tips on teaching our books, say New Concept English, using your ideas and methodology.
4. Every commonest word has so many different meanings and patterns that it's difficult for us to have them exposed to learners. This is partly because too much input at a time will be boring for them and also the limited school term does not allow it. And also I don't think any single corpus can incorporate all meanings or patterns of a word. So would you please give me some suggestions on the methods to tackle this?
5. Can a learner who does not even know how to read ABC be taught using the mothodology mentioned in 《Lexical Syllabu》? If so, how can I make him or her exposed with authentic conversations or sentences which the words are used, since he or she doesn't know a single word in English?
Your prompt reply will be very much appreciated!
Best Regards!
Adora
Hello Adora,
Thanks for all your questions. I’m glad you enjoyed the articles. I’d love to hear how you have put the ideas into practice.
There are really two strands to The Lexical Syllabus. It looks at both methodology and syllabus design. The methodology it recommends is task-based. You have raised two very important questions which worry a lot of people who want to intermediate implement a task-based methodology. The first is I want to use a task-based approach, but my course book is based on a quite different approach. How can I adapt it? And the second is How can I make task-based learning work with beginners?
When Jane and I were writing Doing Task-based Teaching, which was published by OUP early last year, we asked a lot of teachers what they saw as the most important questions to do with applying a task-based approach. These two questions came up time and time again. So the final chapter is entitled How to integrate task-based teaching into course books, and other frequently asked questions. If you can find a copy of the book and read that chapter it should give you some ideas. And Jane is going to be the next guest contributor to this website, and she plans to look at this question in detail then.
Scattered throughout the book you can find ideas on using a task-based approach with beginners. Let me give you a couple of examples of tasks that can be used with beginners in many parts of the world. Begin by asking them how many English words they know already, including English words that are used in their language. They will probably come up with quite a lot. It’s likely that there will be words for food and drink: hamburger, hot dog, coca cola, gin, whisky. They may well include words which are not strictly speaking English, but which are used throughout the English speaking world: pizza, spaghetti etc. Many words to do with sports are likely to be English: football, goal, hockey etc. Then there may be other borrowed words like hello, weekend, Christmas and phrases like no problem and thank you. Once you have made a list of words you can begin to talk about them. Get learners to classify the words into categories like food and drink and sports. Get them to list things they like and things they don’t like. Then you can say things like Hands up if you like football, miming to demonstrate what you mean. Then you can say OK X likes football, but Y doesn’t like football. What about A? Before very long your learners are not beginners at all.
Then there’s the ‘magic bag’ game. Take into the class a bag of everyday items. Say Look what I’ve got in my bag: a ball, a key, some money, a letter … and so on. Start with about five or six items and see if they can remember them. Next time you go into the class say OK, who can remember what’s in my bag? Then give the ball to X, the key to Y, and so on. Say X has got the ball. Who’s got the key? You can develop this to in all kinds of ways, so that you have someone going out while you give out the items then coming in to ask X have you got the ball? and so on. Of course learners will make all kinds of mistakes while they get used to these games, but they will be using English all the time and their English will be improving. You will be able to think of other games to get them using numbers or prepositions of place. It won’t be long before they can do quite a lot in English.
The second strand to The Lexical Syllabus is to do with syllabus design. I stress the importance of the most frequent words and phrases in the language. In Appendix 6 of
Doing Task-based Teaching you can find a list of the 200 most frequent words in English and lists of the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the most frequent 700 words. This is a useful starting point. Whenever you come across these words in texts you are using with your students in class it is worth drawing attention to them. I’ll get back to you tomorrow with an article to help you start from a text and find useful language items for learners to work with.
Hi Adora,
I have just posted an article on the website which Jane and I run. You can find it on:
www.willis-elt.co.uk/books.html at the bottom of the page.
The article is entitled Consciousness-raising Activities. The first part is a general discussion of consciousness-raising (CR) and why we need it. Basically it argues that unless learners think for themselves they will never learn a language, so we need to find techniques in the classroom to help them do this. The second part gives examples of CR activities and hints on how to exploit texts to encourage learners to think about language for themselves.
I hope this will help a bit.
Cheers,
Dave
Hi Dave,
I really don't know how to thank you, for words just can not express my great appreciation to Jane and you.
The article is very useful and practicle, for it has anchors the ideas with examples which make the ideas more explicit.
I've been applying these ideas and methodology to my own teaching little by little, (although with many difficulties and adjustments) and finding them quite inspiring.
Please send my best regards to Jane. Thanks again all your help.
Cheers,
Adora
I promised to post examples of consciousness-raising (C-R) activities appropriate for young learners and elementary learners.
Here’s one which Jane and I included in The Collins COBUILD English Course just over twenty years ago. Learners had just done a task involving family trees and had gone on to work with dialogues in which native speakers did the same tasks. They are now asked to do a C-R activity based on transcripts of those dialogues. There are four categories of words ending in s:
The learners were then asked to look at another short text they had recently used and find more words ending in s:
This draws attention to the terminal s in the third person singular of the present simple tense.
These are simple analysis tasks. They would be appropriate for teenage learners because they are not too demanding in terms of analytical skills, and they would be appropriate for beginners in that they are linguistically quite simple.
The important thing about C-R activities is that they encourage learners to work things out for themselves. It may be some time before they begin to use 's' consistently for plurals and for the present simple, but the fact that they have taken note of these uses means that they are likely to notice them in future input and will begin to adopt them in their own language.
This sort of C-R work is important once we realise that learners learn mainly from exposure to language, not simply from teacher input. The teacher's role ids to draw attention to features of language and encourage and enable learners to look critically at language for themselves.
GO TO our CONFERENCES page to download papers from TESOL France 2007:
Dave: The Logic of Spoken English - and How to Teach it
Spoken English is often described as untidy, disorganised, even ungrammatical. But the fact that we all use it effectively and successfully belies these descriptions. We will look at samples of spontaneous spoken English and list its salient features. We will go on to discuss why it is the way it is. Finally we will look at pedagogic strategies to make our learners more aware of the nature of spontaneous spoken language, and will design exercises to capitalise on this awareness.
Jane: Speaking Spoken Language: a Task-based Approach
Getting language learners to engage fully in spontaneous interactions in class is not always easy. And one reason is that we tend to teach grammar of written language. So what can be done to encourage learners to speak? In this workshop we shall take a close look at the different kinds of spontaneous spoken language and discuss how a task-based approach could generate richer spoken interaction. We shall also look at different ways to set up tasks and follow them up so that learners really want to engage in speaking activities. If you can, bring a specific task to work on during the workshop.
Pattern Grammar: how to tackle it systematically in the classroom.
SUMMARY: If they are to use English fluently learners need a vast store of lexical phrases. Some of these phrases are unpredictable - they need to be learned individually as lexical items. But pattern grammar shows how learners can predict for themselves many phrases based on the most frequent words in the language. I will begin by looking at patterns with verbs and nouns followed by the preposition about. I will show how these patterns relate very closely to the two basic meanings of about. We will then go on to explore the notion of pattern grammar by looking at patterns based on the word for. Again the verbs, nouns and adjectives relate to the basic meanings of for, but in a less obvious way. We will look at the systematic relationship between the preposition for and the words which precede it. Participants will then be invited to explore for themselves patterns based on a number of frequent words like as and with. Finally we will look at more extended patterns and discuss techniques which will enable learners to discover these patterns for themselves.