Professional organisations

The National Association of Language Advisers

For NALA Prof. Eric Hawkins had a very special role, not only through the impact of his work in teaching and research but also because he was instrumental in founding the Association and in its early years of existence. This tribute is complied from the separate and collective memories of NALA members now.

'Our sadness at Eric's passing is mingled with admiration for his seminal contribution to our subject and gratitude for his strong support for NALA. It is clear from long-standing and past members that our Association would not have thrived, and perhaps not even existed, without his support and encouragement in the crucial early years.'

It began at a seminal HMI conference at Bulmershe in 1968... 'By the second day of the Conference, a group of members had taken the initiative and formed the first Committee of a new Association...spontaneously engendered in the Bulmershe College Bar (a scenario of spontaneous engendering which became a model for significant developments replicated in many a JCLA/ALL/NALA event that has followed!)'

NALA held its first annual conference in 1969 and Eric Hawkins became its first President, steering it rapidly into becoming an effective organization. By 1970 NALA had a Journal which in its first edition (April 1970) includes a reproduction of the 'functions of a language adviser' paper with recommendations. It also includes a magisterial article from Eric which a later President, Alan Moys, took as the theme for his Presidential address on the occasion of NALA’s 35th Anniversary, in Eric’s presence. As with so much of Eric’s writing, this article is still completely relevant to discussions in the media today, 40 years later.

Alan Moys writes:
Just a few years ago, at NALA’s 35th Annual Conference, I was delighted and honoured to be invited to pay tribute to Eric Hawkins, who was our guest at the Presidential Dinner. The National Association of Language Advisers' inaugural conference in 1969 came at a time of change and innovation (comprehensive schools, mixed ability classes, the primary languages experiment, the growth of advisory services, audio-visual teaching, language laboratories, the early years of CILT) and we were fortunate enough to have Eric as our first (and greatest) president for those critical first ten years.

For my tribute to Eric, I went back to the first NALA journal, published in April 1970, which was printed for NALA by Eric's department at the University of York. It was a slim volume of just 18 pages, and Eric kindly agreed to contribute an article. Prompted by the hostile observations of a journalist in the 'Times Ed' , Eric's response was typically measured, gentle, authoritative - and a total if kindly worded demolition of the journalist's views. Eric's towering intellect, his often visionary belief in teachers’ capacity to innovate, and his unfailing humanity shine through everything he writes.

For me as for so many, the finest tribute one can make to Eric is to urge others to read his writing. This piece will almost certainly be new to Eric's longstanding admirers, or could equally be a first contact for newcomers to language teaching.

So we'll let Eric speak for himself...

The Dullest and Most Arid of Men

Eric Hawkins (1970)

Since one of the tasks, I suppose, of NALA is to sustain the morale of teachers 'at the coal face', it may be worthwhile to use this piece, which your editor has kindly allowed me to contribute to this first issue, to say a few words about an article in the Times Educational Supplement (20th February 1970) which many modern language teachers will have read with alarm, and some with disgust. It appeared under the heading of 'Astryx' but was signed by one 'Leonard Jackson'. Whichever of these two was the author, and allowing charitably that weekly journalists have to fill their allotted columns somehow, this one contained some pretty strange opinions, advanced as if they were facts, and some even stranger logic.

The author admits at the outset that his article is based on 'no practical experience or competence whatever'. This is a promisingly modest start which makes all the stranger the confident assertions made elsewhere in the article. The following are typical:

Journalism at this level on a serious subject does not merit a reply. It lowers the level one associates with the TES, and one does not wish to debate at this level in correspondence columns. For this reason Astryx's column went unanswered. Teachers of modern languages and LEA advisers do, however, deserve that this kind of thing be refuted.

Astryx's disarmingly admitted 'complete lack of experience of language learning' cannot help him much, but one might have hoped that his vaunted 'sound theory' in linguistics might have done something. Unfortunately, despite his sprinkling of Chomskyan terms ('competence', 'language acquisition capacity') he seems not to understand how language works. Literature, he considers, is educational, but language learning is pure rote learning and therefore anti-educational. It is like saying that playing the Bach suites on the cello is a worthwhile experience, but that all the labour the young cellist does leading up to this experience is anti-educational.

Leaving literature aside, however, what conception can he have of the process of learning a language if he cannot see that understanding a language presupposes learning how another society lives? To give a simple example (it will be wise to keep the discussion at a simple level in the circumstances) if a pupil is to learn to understand the expression 'Voulez-vous un croissant?', he must do a lot more than identify a string of sounds or interpret a syntactic pattern through imitation of a tape or the teacher's voice. He must attach a concept to 'croissant', and this he can only do as part of the picture he builds up of the French way of life. The same is true of 'learning' other names or 'phrases by rote: 'lycée' (a very different institution from a 'grammar school'), 'rive gauche', 'Versailles', 'le midi', 'le pain', with all their connotations for the French, and 'bistro', 'terrasse', 'vin ordinaire', to cite a few instances suggested by a simple train of thought associated with a tourist's visit. Learning even simple terms likes these implies a great deal of background experience acquired from reading, discussions with teachers, assistants, visits to France, etc. At a deeper level, it is even more obvious that no clear distinction can be made between learning a language and learning the way of life of a society. What sense is made of an article on French politics if the words used are not linked in the reader's mind with appropriate concepts? The process of acquiring the language is a process of conceptualising as well as memorising.

Monolingual people take language so much for granted that they often forget its arbitrary nature, and cannot distinguish words from the things they represent. Thus, primitive peoples believed that putting a curse on somebody's name could actually harm his person. People unused to foreign languages tend to find something perverse in the way foreigners talk. Even Oliver Goldsmith could not get over the perversity of the French, who would call a cabbage 'shoe' instead of 'cabbage'. The story is told of an English woman who always wondered why the French call water 'de l'eau', the Italians 'del'acqua', and the Germans 'das Wasser'. 'Only we English people,' she said, 'call it, properly, "water". We not only call it water, but it is water!'

The language teacher by the nature of the subject keeps on fighting against this parochial linguistic narrowness. It is puzzling and sad that Astryx, who seems proud of his 'sound linguistic theory' has not appreciated this obvious point. It must be less obvious, of course, if one has 'no practical experience or competence whatever'. But then when a journalist does lack such experience or competence he might be better advised not to assume that his opinions about it merit publication.

For Astryx, the linguists are 'the dullest and most arid of men'. It may be worth reminding ourselves of the unique contribution that the language teacher can and does make in the average active school community. How many other members of staff will have spent a year studying abroad in a foreign university or as an 'assistant' in a school? The teachers of science or English or even geography will almost always have gone straight from school to university and back to school. Only the language teacher in the normal course of his training undergoes this truly educative experience of breaking away from the society, the diet, the values in which he has grown up, and immersing himself for a long period in a quite differently oriented community.

In short, education through modern language studies is an interesting mixture of acquisition of language skills combined at every point with investigation of another culture. It makes great demands on the teacher, whose own skills and understanding, like those of his pupils, stand to be tested by confrontation with the native speaker, or the foreign text or newspaper. This, of course, trains the modern language teacher to do the ground work which seems so 'dull and arid' to Astryx. It may also explain why he never acquired 'any practical experience or competence whatever'.

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