Jane Willis
Willis
Jane Willis is a British ELT author and teacher educator whose career has combined school teaching, international work, teacher training, and a long publishing life. She taught in several countries, worked extensively in teacher education, and became one of the names most closely associated with practical, classroom-facing TBLT.
If Dave Willis often supplied the descriptive sharpness, Jane Willis often supplied the pedagogic tact. Her writing has the feeling of someone who has spent a great deal of time in real classrooms and has no interest in pretending otherwise. TBLT as a research programme is more often associated with figures like Rod Ellis, but it was Willis who gave it a classroom face teachers could actually pick up and use.
Career
- Taught English and French in a range of international contexts
- Worked in teacher education, including MA-level TESOL settings
- Built a substantial publishing career, often with Dave Willis
- Became a key public face of practical task-based pedagogy
Published Work
- Teaching English Through English (1981)
- The Collins COBUILD English Course (with Dave Willis)
- A Framework for Task-Based Learning (with Dave Willis, 1996)
- Doing Task-Based Teaching (2007)