Graham Crookes
Graham V. Crookes is Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and the clearest English-language advocate for critical language pedagogy in mainstream ELT journals. His career tracks a recognisable shape: conventional high-school teaching in London and Malaysia, then ELT in Japan in the 1980s, then the long pivot toward a values-first account of what language teaching is for.
The early work made him a familiar name in TBLT through contributions on task design and planning time with Michael Long and Gass. The later work — Values, Philosophies, and Beliefs in TESOL (2009), Critical ELT in Action (2013), English for a Critical Mind (with Cogo and Siqueira) — asks teachers to articulate the ethical and political commitments underneath their classroom choices. His 2022 research timeline on critical language pedagogy in Language Teaching is the standard field review.
Career
- Long-tenured Professor of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
- Teacher-education work across Colombia, Denmark, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore, and Vietnam
- Active in teacher-development communities around critical pedagogy and TBLT
Published Work
- Early task-planning and TBLT research with Long, Gass, and others (1980s–1990s)
- Values, Philosophies, and Beliefs in TESOL: Making a Statement (2009, Cambridge)
- Critical ELT in Action (2013, Routledge)
- "Critical language pedagogy: A research timeline," Language Teaching (2022)
- English for a Critical Mind (with Cogo and Siqueira)
Influence
- Made critical pedagogy a first-class citizen inside SLA-literate ELT rather than a heterodox sideline
- Helped define what "philosophy of teaching" means as a practical requirement for teacher education
- A durable interlocutor for the TBLT–critical pedagogy relationship