Theodore Rodgers

Theodore S. Rodgers is an American applied linguist and Emeritus Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His career spanned language teaching, curriculum design, and a long partnership with Jack Richards that produced the most widely used framework in the field for describing language teaching methods.

Rodgers is rarely discussed alone — which is itself a kind of achievement. Richards and Rodgers's three-level schema (approach, design, procedure) is taught to almost every new MA TESOL student as the skeleton on which the grammar-translation, audiolingual, communicative, and later approaches hang. His solo and later co-authored work extended this frame into curriculum and technology-mediated instruction.

Career

• PhD from Stanford University
• Long career at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
• Consultancy on curriculum design across Asia and the Pacific
• Longtime collaborator with Richards

Published Work

• Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (with Jack C. Richards, 1986, 2001, 2014)
• Work on language curriculum, materials design, and computer-mediated language learning

Influence

• Co-creator of the field's default taxonomy of methods
• His approach-design-procedure hierarchy gives teachers a vocabulary for separating theory from technique
• Enduring presence in teacher education reading lists