My father, Brian Heaton, who has died aged 83, was a world authority in teaching English as a foreign language, publishing under the name JB Heaton.
Son of Norman and Evelyn Heaton, Brian was born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, where his father managed a wool factory. He studied English at Leeds University, returning there in 1968 as lecturer in English for overseas students. He subsequently developed this one-man, one-room role into a freestanding internationally renowned English language unit.
In the interim, having gained a PGCE teaching qualification and applied to the colonial service, Brian worked for the Education Department in Hong Kong. There he became expert in the teaching of English as a foreign language, and in developing teaching materials relevant to the culture of international students.
In 1968 he co-founded the professional network Specialist English Language Materials for University Students, which later became the British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes. His experience of different cultures enabled him to foster a sense of community and shared goals among international students from diverse backgrounds. He also contributed a key component to Leeds University’s postgraduate diploma in teaching English as a second/foreign language.
Already a published writer of short stories and teaching materials while in Hong Kong, Brian became a prolific author of course books. Having devised an English test for international students entering Leeds University, Brian became an expert in English language proficiency testing, and was invited by the British Council to take part in numerous professional training programmes, principally in Europe. He was a visiting professor, first in Singapore in the 1970s, and then in Japan in the 1980s, representing the Cambridge Examination Syndicate, and subsequently continued this role during a visit to China in the 1990s, where he specified the Cambridge Business English test for China.
Brian used his talents, contacts and geniality to take a key role in a variety of contexts. These included involvement in the 1970s in improving the language skills of overseas NHS psychiatrists, and in the 1980s delivering a language and culture programme for English teachers from across the Soviet Union, under the British-Soviet cultural agreement administered by the British Council. In the 1990s he helped his department to win repeated contracts to deliver English programmes for young diplomatic staff from Taiwan.
Brian had wider interests in music and painting. He played the piano, and when living in Singapore took classes in Chinese painting techniques. In retirement in the UK he took up oil painting.
He is survived by his wife, Elisa, a musician and teacher, whom he met in his early working life in Hong Kong and married in 1958, by me and by two grandsons.
