Freebairn, Ingrid

Short biography

Ingrid Freebairn received a degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Linguistics and Language Teaching from Reading University. In the 1970s she was employed at 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), which at the time was headed by Brian Abbs. In the mid-1970s, she also spent some time in Sweden working at the Centre for British Teachers.
While at Ealing, Freebairn worked as a teacher and course designer together with Brian Abbs, catering for the needs of adult learners from diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds, who required support in learning English for their professional purposes.
Ingrid Freebairn’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 Brian Abbs, Ingrid Freebairn contributed to innovating ELT materials by combining “a functional syllabus focus and communicative methodology” (Rixon and Smith 2012, 388). Freebairn and Abbs 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, Ingrid Freebairn and Brian Abbs 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.