George Whitehead

Dr. George Whitehead is a Lecturer in the Language & Literacy Education Department at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in L2 teacher education and context-specific language teaching practices, with research interests spanning English as an additional language, instructional approaches, and decolonizing pedagogies.

He holds a B.A. in Linguistics from Simon Fraser University, M.A. in TEFL/TESL from the University of Birmingham, and Ph.D. in Education from the University of Leicester. Prior to UBC, he served as Associate Professor and Chair of the English Language Teaching Department at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea for 16 years.

Dr. Whitehead's research explores factors impacting language teacher commitment, pronunciation teaching difficulties, dialogic teaching implementation, and technology-mediated reading comprehension. His work consistently examines how language teaching practices are shaped by cultural contexts and professional development experiences.

Publications demonstrate strong methodological diversity including empirical studies on teacher cognition, experimental comparisons of educational media, and critical examinations of teacher education programs across multiple countries including South Korea, Turkey, and Canada.