Abbs, Brian

Short biography

Brian Abbs had a degree in English Literature from Leicester University and one in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. In the 1960s he produced Hallo!, an audiovisual English course targeting primary school learners. The course was remarkable in the way it integrated textual contents and visual design, which is a characteristic that can be noted in Abbs’s later ELT materials production too.
In the 1970s, Abbs became Head of the ELT Division at Ealing Technical College (later renamed Ealing College of Higher Education, then Thames Valley University, and finally incorporated into the University of West London), after having taken up a lectureship in English.
During his appointment as Head of the ELT Division, he hired Ingrid Freebairn as a lecturer, and they began working together as teachers and course designers, catering for the needs of adult learners from diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds, who required support in learning English for their professional purposes.
Brian Abbs’s full-time career as an ELT materials writers started in the 1970s while at Ealing, and it went on until the early 2000s. Together with Ingrid Freebairn, Brian Abbs contributed to innovating ELT materials by combining “a functional syllabus focus and communicative methodology” (Rixon and Smith 2012, 388). Abbs and Freebairn co-authored popular courses published by Longman, such as Strategies, Discoveries, Blueprint (adapted as Flying start), Snapshot (adapted as In focus, Postcards, and Reflex), and Sky. Strategies, first published as a single volume in 1975 and later expanded, was particularly successful at the time it was published because of “its grounding in realistically presented contexts of language use and the focus placed on language functions” (Rixon and Smith 2012, 385). Later materials published between the 1980s and 2000s “reflected the authors’ […] thinking and developments in mainstream education as well as changes in language teaching” (Rixon and Smith 2012, 389), for example, by integrating differentiated learning within the course, to meet the needs of learners in mixed ability classes.
In 2011, Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the ELTons ceremony in London. The award acknowledged both authors’ fundamental contribution to the ELT profession, especially as regards their materials production targeting adolescents and young learners.