About us

Dave (my late husband) and I met in Ghana, West Africa, where we were both teaching English in a rural secondary school. We moved to Cyprus for four years (where our two girls were born) and then spent five years teaching in Tehran. We left Iran just before the 1979 revolution.

We first began experimenting with tasks with a team at the British Council teaching centre in Singapore in the 1980s, inspired by the success of Prabhu’s Bangalore project. We began using recordings of fluent speakers doing tasks and noticed that learners who listened to them again at home learnt more and gained confidence more quickly. But all classes requested ‘grammar’. So we incorporated a focus on form by exploiting the grammar and lexical items that occurred naturally in the task recordings and texts used during the task sequence.

Together, we gradually refined the task cycle, adding the planning and reporting stages to stimulate a natural desire for accuracy as well as fluency. (See Willis & Willis, 2010 for the background research). In the mid-1980s, working with Collins and the Birmingham University international Language Data-base (COBUILD) we piloted and designed a 3 level English course centred around tasks and incorporating a lexical syllabus. I, Jane, went on to write the first edition of A Framework for Task-based Learning in 1996, while Dave developed his ideas on grammar, lexis and learning. See Willis, D. 2003 which shows how TBLT can help learners explore seven different aspects of grammar and lexis.

Willis D. 2003. Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press (looks at how to teach grammar through TBL)

Willis, D. and Willis, J. 2010. ‘Six propositions in search of a methodology: applying linguistics to task-based language teaching’ in S. Hunston & D. Oakey (eds) Introducing Applied Linguistics: Concepts and Skills Routledge. Chapter 6.

Meet Jane Willis

Jane Willis started her career teaching French in Ghana and has since worked extensively overseas (Cyprus, Iran and Singapore) as an English teacher and trainer. She began writing in Iran with Teaching English Through English, for local teachers who found it difficult speaking English in their classes. She has run teacher development courses and taken part in ELT consultancies in many countries, including China, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Middle East, South America and Europe. She especially enjoys working with teachers of Foreign Languages who want to adopt a task-based approach. She speaks French well, some Spanish and German, and a little Greek, Italian and Farsi.

Back in UK, after writing (jointly with Dave) The Collins Cobuild English Course (a task-based course with a lexical syllabus), she joined Aston University, Birmingham, where she tutored for 12 years on their Distance Learning Masters programmes in TESOL and TESP and taught English one day a week. She retired from Aston in 2004 but continues to speak at conferences and is still active on the TBLT scene. She travels by train throughout Europe and in 2022 she went to the IATBLT (International Association of Task-based Language Teaching) conference in Austria where she was presented with their inaugural Distinguished Practitioner Award.

Her books include Task-based Instruction in Foreign Language Education: Practices and Programs co-edited with Betty Lou Leaver (Georgetown University Press) and three prize-winning titles: the original A Framework for Task-based Learning, then English for Primary Teachers (with Mary Slattery) (Oxford University Press) and, with Corony Edwards, Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching (Palgrave Macmillan), which won a British Council Innovations Award in March 2006. In 2013 she completed and published Dave Willis’s last book, Winning the Grammar Wars – what grammar really is and how we use it, – a lively overview of many aspects of the English Language for teachers, parents and educators. Her most recent book, written with two TBLT practitioners, is the revised edition of one of her first books: A Framework for Task-Based Learning and Teaching (Multi-lingual Matters).

She lives near her two daughters in the North West of England in the beautiful Lake District, where she leads walks for the local u3a (university of the third age). She enjoys gardening, loves singing and teaches two Tai Chi. Groups.

Dave Willis

Dave Willis worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in Ghana, Cyprus, Iran and Singapore, as well as the UK. He was a British Council Officer for almost twenty years, before moving to the Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he taught on TEFL/TESOL Masters programmes

He published widely on discourse analysis, ELT methodology and language description for language teaching. He was author, with Jane Willis of The Collins Cobuild English Course, and co-edited with her Challenge and Change in Language Teaching (Heinemann 1996). He wrote The Lexical Syllabus (Collins Cobuild, 1990) and was co-author, with Ramesh Krishnamurthy, of The Cobuild Students’ Grammar and, with John Wright, of The Cobuild Basic Grammar. He was twice winner of the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh Prize for ELT publications. His latest books are Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and lexis in English language teaching (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Doing Task-based Teaching (Oxford University Press, 2007), co-authored with Jane. He spent 12 years of happy retirement in the English Lake District,close to his wider family and five grandchildren. He maintained his interest in ELT throughout, writing articles, encyclopaedia entries, going to conferences and running this web-site, which he started from scratch when he retired. He had nearly finished a polemic book on English grammar for a general audience when he died in October 2013 during routine heart surgery. Completed by Jane, it is now published as a Kindle Ebook – Winning the Grammar Wars – what grammar really is and how we use it.

The news of Dave’s death quickly spread round the ELT world and tributes poured in. Several people wrote about his contributions to the ELT profession. Leo Selivan wrote about his contribution to his work in the lexical field.