Biography
Richard has an MA in History from Oxford University , a PGCE and Diploma in Teaching English Overseas from Manchester University, and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Reading University.
Richard began teaching English in 1974 in Nepal with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), where he worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in Faculties of Humanities and Education in the towns of Birganj (on the Indian border) and Dhankuta (in the foothills of the Himalayas, east of Mt Everest). Returning to England in 1978 to complete his PGCE and Diploma in Teaching English Overseas, he then went to Greece and for the next five years worked as a teacher and teacher trainer at the British Council teaching centre in Athens.
After a year in England completing his MA in Applied Linguistics, with the assistance of a British Council scholarship, he spent the next eleven years working in a consultancy capacity on ELT projects sponsored by the British Overseas Development Agency (now the Department for International Development: DfID), and managed by the British Council. This work first took him and his family to Egypt , where between 1985 and 1989 he was the INSET consultant on a national ELT project based at Ain Shams University in Cairo . From there he went to Bangladesh to work with the National Curriculum and Textbook Board in Dhaka on the development of secondary school textbooks and a new syllabus for English in the Teacher Training Colleges. Two years later in 1992 he moved to Tanzania to work on a large English Language Teaching Support Project involving the establishment of a Trainer Training Centre at the Chang'ombe Teachers' College in Dar-es-Salaam, and the design of courses and materials to support the training of trainers for the delivery of a nationwide INSET programme.
In 1996, Richard returned to England to join the Department of English and Language Studies at Christ Church . Many of his research and professional interests stem from his work overseas, particularly in the areas of teacher education, trainer training and classroom talk, where he has made extensive use of transcript data generated from video recordings of secondary school English classes in Egypt and Tanzania.
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