Michael Swan
Michael Swan is a British ELT writer whose Practical English Usage has sold over two million copies and sits on more teachers' desks than any single reference in the field. Oxford-trained, twenty years inside classrooms in Britain and abroad, founder of the Swan School of English: the career is unusually grounded in day-to-day teaching, and it shows in the writing.
Swan's interests run in a straight line from the classroom to theory and back. He writes pedagogic grammar that assumes intelligent adult learners, argues in print for the place of explicit instruction and mother-tongue awareness in SLA, and has been one of the most visible public critics of strong-form TBLT. His 2005 Applied Linguistics paper "Legislation by Hypothesis: The Case of Task-Based Instruction" became a standard citation for sceptics of the Long/Robinson research programme, and set up the exchanges that still define the field's TBLT debate.
Career
- BA in Modern Languages, Oxford; postgraduate research at Oxford
- Founder of the Swan School of English
- Long writing partnership with Catherine Walter
Published Work
- Practical English Usage (OUP, four editions since 1980): the dominant teacher-facing English grammar reference
- Basic English Usage (OUP)
- Grammar (OUP): a short book on why languages need grammar and what they do with it
- The Oxford English Grammar Course (with Catherine Walter, OUP)
- How English Works and The Good Grammar Book (with Catherine Walter)
- "Legislation by Hypothesis: The Case of Task-Based Instruction," Applied Linguistics (2005)
Influence
- Defined pedagogic grammar for a generation of English teachers through Practical English Usage
- His TBLT critique gave the field's sceptics their most-cited article and forced TBLT proponents to clarify the claim
- The 2012 British Council ELT Writing Award went to his Oxford English Grammar Course (Advanced): institutional recognition for a writer usually categorised as "just" a materials author