Colleagues
Raphael Salkie
Professor of Language Studies, University of Brighton
Dick Hudson says it perfectly: "He had a vision which was so simple and so obviously right". I met Eric Hawkins in 1986 at a conference in Poitiers, where his obvious modesty, and the equally obvious great respect in which he was held by everyone, were very impressive. I remember he said thoughtfully that French was a terrible first language for schoolchildren in England to learn, because of the initial pronunciation and grammatical difficulties that it posed.
I decided to find out more about this interesting man, and discovered that he had edited a series of activity books about language for primary schools. A few years later my sister, a primary teacher, talked excitedly about some material that she had used with marvellous success in her class of eight year olds, and showed me these activity books.
Encouraging young children to learn language awareness is a winning notion in so many ways. As my sister found, they simply lap it up. Exploring relationships between languages, finding out about the history of English words, playing with sounds, and discovering interesting facts about the languages of the world - all this is exciting and makes educational sense. It exposes children to science, history and social studies in ways that connect with their own lives. Importantly at a time when many classrooms have native speakers of lots of languages, it helps young people take pride in their backgrounds, for instance by looking at the variety of languages spoken in their own family.
I have long believed that using Eric Hawkins' language awareness material in schools should replace compulsory foreign language teaching. Most teenagers are at exactly the worst age to learn a foreign language. The time would be better spent promoting an awareness that there are many languages in the world beside English, each with its unique complexities and cultural traditions; and giving students some basic terminology about phonetics, grammar, and linguistic variation. For those young people who are really keen, by all means go on to teach them specific languages. For the majority, this should wait until they have a strong motivation to learn a language. When that time comes, their heightened awareness of language will give them a solid foundation so that they learn quickly and effectively.
This is a radical view, which not every linguist shares. We can surely all agree, however, that language awareness in primary schools is an idea which is worth fighting for. Eric Hawkins did more than anyone to promote that vision, and I have no doubt that it will eventually succeed. Future generations will ask why it took so long for such self-evident common sense to become accepted.