Jack C. Richards
Jack Croft Richards is a New Zealand-born applied linguist whose career has spanned teaching, teacher education, curriculum design, and an extraordinarily prolific publishing life. Born in 1943, he studied at Victoria University of Wellington and Laval University (PhD, 1972), and has since held positions in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hawai'i, and back in New Zealand, where he is an honorary professor at Victoria and the University of Sydney.
Richards is one of those figures whose work quietly underpins a great deal of everyday ELT without always being visible. His textbook series fill coursebook shelves worldwide; his methodological writing frames how teacher trainees first meet the field. If there is a house style for how ELT is explained to teachers at the start of their careers, Richards helped write it.
Career
- PhD from Laval University, Canada (1972)
- Academic posts at the University of Hawai'i, City University of Hong Kong, SEAMEO RELC in Singapore, and Victoria University of Wellington
- Long involvement with teacher education programs across Asia and the Pacific
- Founded the Jack C. Richards Scholarship at Victoria University of Wellington
Published Work
- Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (with Theodore Rodgers, 1986, 2001, 2014) — the canonical survey of twentieth-century methods
- The Language Teaching Matrix (1990)
- Curriculum Development in Language Teaching (2001)
- Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (with Richard Schmidt, multiple editions)
- Interchange and New Interchange series (Cambridge) — one of the best-selling global ELT coursebooks
- Key Issues in Language Teaching (2015)
Influence
- With Theodore Rodgers, gave the field its most widely used taxonomy of approach, method, and technique
- Defined how a generation of MA TESOL students met brand-name methods and communicative ideas
- Shaped coursebook-driven global ELT through the Interchange franchise
- One of the most cited figures in applied linguistics reference works