Colleagues
Richard Hudson
Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, UCL
I only met Eric Hawkins once, but he was one of my heroes in the world of educational linguistics. He had a vision which was so simple and so obviously right. Called 'Language awareness', it consisted of a world in which English teachers worked in harmony with foreign-language teachers and schoolchildren heard the same stories from both about how language works. Some of the stories they heard were about their mother tongue, others were about a foreign language, but the stories all contained the same themes of structure, complexity and interest. The vision included a strong bridge between the academic research world of linguistics and the world of language education in which information flowed in both directions, to the enormous benefit of both sides.
Eric's vision has had an astonishing impact across the world, as can be seen from the regular international meetings of the Language Awareness Association; and it infuses a great deal of the official rhetoric about foreign-language teaching in this country (though less so in English teaching). Unfortunately, the vision is still just that in this country. In 1999 Eric wrote: "Twenty-five years ago, .... Teachers of these [different language] subjects never went into each other's classrooms to hear what their colleagues were saying about language. They had not even tried to agree a common vocabulary in which to talk about language. In the years that have elapsed, little has changed in this respect, ...". In 2010 we're still waiting for Eric's vision to come true, but at least we all know for sure what it will look like when it does.