Jane Willis: award winning writer, speaker and consultant on English language teaching

WMG 300812 Photo by Glen Gater. Caption: Kendal in Bloom piece - Jane Willis won the best sustainable garden.

 

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 in 2004, but continues to speak at conferences and run workshops for language teachers. Living in the English Lake District, she enjoys hill walking with friends and family; she also teaches Tai Chi.

Her more recent 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: A Framework for Task-based Learning (Intrinsic), 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. She has recently completed and published Dave Willis’s last book, Winning the Grammar Wars – what grammar really is and how we use it,  which describes English in a holistic way – a broad overview for teachers, parents and educators.