Jonathan Newton has worked in language teaching and language teacher education for more than thirty years in both New Zealand and China where he began his teaching career. From 2002 to 2016 he was Programme Director for the BEd(TESOL) twinning program at Victoria University, a role that involved working closely with Malaysian student teachers and Malaysian teacher training institutions. He is currently Programme Director for the MA Programme in TESOL, Applied Linguistics, and Second Language Learning and Teaching.

Jonathan is the book review editor for the journal Language Teaching for Young Learners (LTYL). He is particularly interested in reviews of classroom language learning textbooks as well as academic books.

Research background

Jonathan’s research focuses on the following main areas:

• language teaching methodology and task-based language teaching (TBLT)
• teacher cognition and professional learning for language teachers
• the interface of culture and language in language teaching and learning
• language/communication training and materials design for the multicultural workplace.

He has published in a range of books and in journals including Second Language Research, The Journal of Second Language Writing, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, System, Language Teaching Research, Journal of Pragmatics, English Language Teaching Journal, Modern English Teacher, and Language Learning.

He has co-authored three books: Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking (2009) (with Paul Nation), Workplace Talk in Action: An ESOL Resource (2010) (with Nicky Riddiford), and Teaching English to second language learners in academic contexts: Reading, writing, listening, speaking (2018) with Bill Grabe, Fredricka Stoller, Dana Ferris, Christine Goh, and Larry Vandergrift.

He is currently working on two books, due for publication in late 2018: English teaching and intercultural learning in Asia (for TEFLIN) and another on Using tasks in language teaching (for RELC).

He is involved in research projects on teacher cognition in the areas of second language vocabulary teaching and TBLT, and on motivations and disincentives for studying Asia-Pacific languages in New Zealand.

Google scholar

Read more at:

https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/jonathan-newton