Tim Johns Explained

Timothy Francis Johns (1936 – 2009) was a British academic, strongly associated with the origins and development of data-driven learning (DDL), an approach to learning foreign languages which has learners use the output of computer concordancers, either interactively on screen or via paper printouts, to discover grammar rules and facts about word associations and meanings.

Johns was appointed to the fledgling English for Overseas Students Unit (EOSU) of Birmingham University in 1971 and remained there for the rest of his career. During the 1970s he developed remedial English programs for all departments, but also worked with a colleague, Tony Dudley-Evans, on an innovative team-teaching approach involving the staff of two departments, Highway Engineering and Plant Biology.^[1] ^[2] Reports of this work were published by the British Council and were influential outside Birmingham, in particular on work done at the University of Malaysia.^[3] In a significant article written with Flo Davies he urged vehemently that students coming to British universities from overseas should work with authentic texts, not with decontextualised sentences or simplified readers.^[4]

Notes and References

Johns, T.F. and Dudley-Evans, A. “An experiment in team teaching of overseas postgraduate students of transportation and plant biology.” ELT Documents 106, The British Council, 1980. Reprinted in Swales, Episodes in ESP, Pergamon Press, 1985.
Johns, T.F. and Dudley-Evans, A. “A team-teaching approach to lecture comprehension for overseas students.” In The teaching of listening comprehension, special issue of ELT Documents, The British Council. 1981.
Chitravelu, et al. ‘The University of Malaya English for Special Purposes Project’. ELT Documents 107: The British Council. 1980.
Johns, Tim and Davies, Florence. “Text as vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language.” In Reading in a foreign language (University of Aston), Vol 1 No 1, March 1983.