Smith, Richard C., 1961- and Maley, A. (Alan). (2004) Lionel Billows (1909 – 2004): in memoriam. English Language Teacher Education and Development, Vol.8 . pp. 83-87. ISSN 1365-3741

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Abstract

Lionel Billows, who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-four, was a pioneer of what came to be known as ‘situational language teaching’, the mainstream approach which preceded communicative language teaching in the British ELT tradition. He was best-known for his book Techniques of Language Teaching (1961), whose humanism and continuing interest value Maley (2001) has recently highlighted. Billows’ most notable practical achievement was his work as Education Officer for the British Council in South India between 1954 and 1960, when he conceived and initially directed a ‘campaign’ for the wholesale retraining of 28,000 Primary School teachers. This project has entered ELT mythology as the ‘Madras Snowball’, due to an article by Billows’ successor which unaccountably fails to mention his contribution (Smith 1962), but Billows himself disliked the term, preferring to call it instead the ‘MELT (Madras English Language Teaching) Campaign’.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1501 Primary Education P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Applied Linguistics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Billows, F. L., British Council, English language -- Study and teaching -- Foreign speakers, Primary school teachers -- Training of
Journal or Publication Title:	English Language Teacher Education and Development
Publisher:	University of Warwick
ISSN:	1365-3741
Date:	2004
Volume:	Vol.8
Page Range:	pp. 83-87
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
References:	Billows, F.L. 1961. The Techniques of Language Teaching. London: Longmans. To be reprinted in Smith, R.C. (ed.). Forthcoming. Teaching English as a Foreign Language, 1936–1961: Foundations of ELT, Volume 6. London: Routledge. Maley, A. 2001. ‘A matter of time’. English Teaching Professional 18 (January 2001): 5–9. Pennycook, A. 1994. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. Harlow: Longman. Prabhu, N.S. 1987. Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, D.A. 1962. ‘The Madras “Snowball”: an attempt to retrain 27,000 teachers of English to beginners’. English Language Teaching 17/1: 3–9.
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/3237

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