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’