N.S. Prabhu
N.S. Prabhu is an Indian educator and applied linguist whose name is permanently linked to the Bangalore Project and the early history of task-based pedagogy. He worked in India and later at the National University of Singapore, and he remains one of the few figures in ELT whose professional legacy is tied to a single project that changed the direction of the field.
Prabhu's writing has an unmistakable tone: patient, economical, and quietly radical. He does not sound like someone trying to found a movement, which is part of why the movement stuck. His procedural syllabus, later absorbed into the vocabulary of TBLT and Syllabus Design, came out of a teacher-researcher's question rather than a theorist's thesis: what if classrooms took meaning seriously before they took form seriously?
Career
- Led the Bangalore Project in the late 1970s and early 1980s
- Worked in teacher education and curriculum development in South Asia and Singapore
- Became a foundational reference point in later debates on tasks and syllabuses
- Remained influential through a comparatively compact but enduring body of writing
Published Work
- Second Language Pedagogy (1987)
- There Is No Best Method - Why? (1990)
- Key writings on task-based pedagogy and procedural syllabuses