About us
Jane and Dave Willis met in Ghana, West Africa, in the 1960s, teaching English—so it has been a long partnership! They spent the next twenty years with the British Council, travelling the globe with their two daughters, teaching and teacher-training.
They returned to the UK in 1986. In 1990 Dave joined the staff of Birmingham University and Jane began working at Aston University, both teaching on TEFL/TESOL Masters programmes for teachers of English worldwide. Their specialist fields are task-based language teaching and lexical approaches; Dave is known for his work on pedagogic grammar and the relationship between grammar and lexis while Jane specialises in classroom interaction—especially young learner classrooms overseas.
During this time they published several books, five of which have been prize-winners. In the early 2000s they retired gradually from their university work and moved to Kendal, a small town in the English Lake District, where they live close to their families and their five grandchildren. They have since written three more books.
Jane Willis started her career teaching French in Ghana and has since worked extensively overseas (Cyprus, Iran, Singapore) as an English teacher and trainer. She began writing in Iran with Teaching English Through English. 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.
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 carry out consultancy work. Living in the English Lake District, she does a lot of hill walking with friends and family; she also teaches Tai Chi and is learning to sing.
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 (Longman), 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.
Dave Willis has 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 has 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 is author of The Lexical Syllabus (Collins Cobuild, 1990) and co-author, with Ramesh Krishnamurthy, of The Cobuild Students’ Grammar and, with John Wright, of The Cobuild Basic Grammar. He is 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 now lives happily in retirement in the English Lake District, where he enjoys playing with his grandchildren, walking on the fells, creative writing and the occasional game of bad golf. He maintains his interest in ELT through writing, conference attendance, and occasional consultancies.
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