Nick Bilbrough
Nick Bilbrough is a British ELT teacher, trainer, and author whose work has helped return memory, storytelling, and drama to mainstream methodology discussion. He is best known for Memory Activities for Language Learning (2011) in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series, and for the Hands Up Project, the storytelling and drama initiative he founded to work with young learners in Palestine and other under-resourced settings.
Bilbrough has a practitioner's instinct for the techniques that keep a language in the body (memorised lines, rhyming stories, reformulated texts, plays learned by heart) and writes about them without the defensiveness that has dogged memorisation in ELT since the communicative turn.
Career
- Long international career as teacher, teacher-trainer, and workshop presenter
- Author in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series edited by Scott Thornbury
- Founder of the Hands Up Project, specialising in live online storytelling and drama with children in Palestine and Gaza
- Continuing work on drama, storytelling, and remote teaching in conflict-affected contexts
Published Work
- Dialogue Activities: Exploring Spoken Interaction in the Language Class (2007)
- Memory Activities for Language Learning (2011)
- Stories Alive (Hands Up Project, 2017)
On Memorisation
Bilbrough's argument, across his writing and teacher training, is that learning texts by heart is compatible with emergent and learner-centred methodologies rather than opposed to them. A reformulated learner text, a CLL dialogue, a rhyming children's story: any of these becomes more durable once memorised, and the memorisation is most productive when the learner has chosen or co-created the text. His own case is typical: three years in Denmark studying drama in Danish produced more fluent language than three years in Brazil without that investment, and his subsequent deliberate learning of Brazilian songs by heart has let him notice patterns that earlier exposure in-country had let pass.
Influence
- Gave memorisation a practical vocabulary in a field that had mostly stopped naming it
- Helped reframe drama and storytelling as memory-led methodology rather than enrichment add-ons
- Through the Hands Up Project, demonstrated that memorised performance (plays, poems, storytelling) transfers productively in severely input-limited settings