D.A. Wilkins

D.A. Wilkins (David Arthur Wilkins) was a British applied linguist whose career is closely tied to the University of Reading, early applied linguistics in Britain, and the Council of Europe's modern languages work. He belongs to that important generation of scholars who helped move language teaching out of a narrow structuralist groove and into something recognizably communicative.

Wilkins is not one of the flamboyant personalities of ELT history. He is more interesting than that. His influence is quiet, architectural, and everywhere once you start looking for it. Much of what later became CLT, modern Curriculum Design Approaches, and the specification work behind the CEFR passes, at some point, through Wilkins.

Career

• Associated with the University of Reading and with the formative years of British applied linguistics
• Contributed to Council of Europe language projects in the 1970s
• Helped shape the intellectual background to communicative syllabus design
• Remembered less as a guru than as a scholar whose classifications changed the field's vocabulary

Published Work

• Linguistics in Language Teaching (1972)
• Grammatical, Situational and Notional Syllabuses (1976)
• Notional Syllabuses (1976)
• Second-Language Learning and Teaching (1974)

Influence

• Quiet but foundational influence on syllabus design, communicative curriculum thinking, and later CEFR-style language specification
• One of the background architects of communicative language teaching rather than one of its loudest public names
• Continues to matter whenever the field asks what, exactly, a syllabus should be organized around