This volume brings together, for the first time, N. S. Prabhu’s thoughts and ideas on language pedagogy as they have evolved over the decades. It captures different stages in an intellectual journey, from making a quiet entry into the world of ELT through an article published in a daily newspaper in 1966 to becoming one of the best-known practitioners and radical thinkers in the field. Geetha Durairajan has edited this collection taking care to draw attention to those arguments which are specially relevant to the ELT debate in India.

N. S. Prabhu has an MA in English Literature from the University of Madras and an MA as well as a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Reading, U.K. He taught English to undergraduate classes in colleges for about ten years, then spent twenty years working for the British Council giving advice and short courses to college lecturers on teaching English to undergraduate students, and then moved to the National University of Singapore to teach applied linguistics for ten years. He has also been visiting faculty at universities in Hong Kong, Japan and Brazil.
He is most widely known in the ELT profession for what is referred to as the Bangalore Project which was a five-year experiment in teaching English to children in mother-tongue medium schools through problem-solving (‘task-based’) activities, and is described in his book Second Language Pedagogy (1987).

Geetha Durairajan (Ed.) is Professor, School of English Language Education, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.