Dave Willis
Dave Willis (d. October 2013) was a British applied linguist and materials developer whose career linked classroom teaching, corpus work, and practical pedagogy unusually well. From 1990 to 2000 he was Senior Lecturer at the Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Birmingham, teaching mainly on MA TEFL/TESOL programmes. His PhD, from Birmingham, was on discourse analysis. He died suddenly during routine heart surgery while finishing a book on grammar myths for a general readership.
Willis is often remembered in tandem with Jane Willis, and not without reason: together they became one of ELT's genuinely productive intellectual partnerships. He had a gift for making patterning in real language feel both observable and teachable. His lexical syllabus work fed into the wider development of TBLT and ran parallel to Michael Lewis's more theatrical lexical arguments, though his own contribution was quieter: he changed what teachers looked at when they looked at language.
Career
- Taught English internationally and worked in teacher education
- Became associated with COBUILD and corpus-informed materials writing
- Built a long collaborative publishing career with Jane Willis
- Remained influential in methodology discussions on lexis, grammar, and task-based teaching
Published Work
- The Collins COBUILD English Course (with Jane Willis)
- Challenge and Change in Language Teaching (co-edited with Jane Willis, 1996)
- A Framework for Task-Based Learning (with Jane Willis, 1996)
- Rules, Patterns and Words (2003)
Influence
- Strong influence on corpus-informed materials writing and practical task-based methodology
- Helped teachers see grammar and lexis as patterned partners rather than separate kingdoms
- Important as one half of a rare collaboration that changed both description and pedagogy