Craig Lambert
Craig Lambert is an applied linguist whose work has concentrated on task-based language teaching, task design, and, more recently, learner engagement. Based at Curtin University in Australia, he came to task-based language teaching after long classroom experience in Japan, and his writing carries the pragmatic edge of someone who has had to make tasks work with real students.
Lambert's distinctive contribution is the argument that task content derived from learners' own lives — their actual experiences, opinions, and future scenarios — produces richer engagement than generic topics handed down by syllabus writers. His work on cognitive engagement and social engagement in tasks has sharpened the question of what "engaging" a task actually means, beyond the vague sense in which the word is usually used.
Career
- PhD in Applied Linguistics
- Long teaching career in Japan
- Currently based at Curtin University, Western Australia
- Frequent collaborator with Ellis, Skehan, and other TBLT figures
Published Work
- Task-Based Language Teaching: Theory and Practice (with Rod Ellis, Peter Skehan, Shaofeng Li, Natsuko Shintani, 2019)
- Referent Similarity and Nominal Syntax in Task-Based Language Teaching (2019)
- Numerous articles on learner-generated content, engagement, and task complexity
Influence
- Helped move the TBLT literature beyond abstract models toward designed, engagement-literate task practice
- His work on task engagement has been widely cited in studies of motivation during task performance
- A frequent reference point in recent discussions of needs-analysis-driven task design