Professional organisations
The Languages Company
Lid King, National Director for Languages
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Eric Hawkins, one of the most important figures in languages teaching that this country has known.
From his first experience of the "strange alluring song" of another language in 1924 when he was 9 year old school boy at the Liverpool Institute, Eric's life was a journey through and into language. From Liverpool he won a scholarship to Cambridge, visited Republican Spain in the 1930s and Germany before and after the 2nd War; having been turned down for the intelligence corps, since his Danish wife Ellen and daughter Anne were still in occupied Europe, he joined the infantry and fought in North Africa, Italy and Palestine. After the War he resumed his career as a linguist and an educator putting into practice his beliefs in the power of language and in its potential for uniting and illuminating people - establishing some of the first school links and exchanges between England and France and Germany.
From the 1960s he was at the heart of many of the key developments not only in "foreign" language teaching, but in language teaching and learning more generally - for example the Plowden and Rampton Reports - and he became the first Director of the Language Teaching Centre at York. He will be remembered by generations of language teachers, including that younger generation who discovered his insightful wisdom at national Conferences on language teaching in the 1990s. Much of what he said and wrote remains relevant to our current concerns and debates - on languages in the curriculum and language across the curriculum, on the desirability of immersion in language (as opposed to his vivid description of "gardening in a gale"), on the role of grammar in a communicative classroom. It was he who first articulated a systematic programme for "language awareness" as a key part of language learning; he also helped to analyse the specificity of early language learning - the importance for example of "education of the ear" and empathy in young learners; perhaps most of all he promoted the need to redress the "uneven playing field" in language learning by offering access to intercultural experiences and adult discourse for all learners…For Eric language truly was an enchanting song and a defining characteristic of humankind.
Fortunately his work still remains. His family are also intending to set up a website on Remembering Eric Hawkins, where people can share their thoughts and contributions and over the coming months we will have the time to reflect and share more about his contribution. For now let us just remember a good friend and humane educator and singer of songs who has touched so many of our lives.