Professional organisations
University of York
Eric Hawkins, Professor Emeritus, who died on 31 October 2010, aged 95, was one of Britain’s foremost figures in language education.
In the mid 1960's, he was invited to join the new University of York to set up a Language Teaching Centre. It had four main activities: teacher training, production of teaching materials, research into methodology, and actual language teaching ("service courses"). Under Eric’s guidance, the LTC rapidly became nationally known as a "centre of excellence".
Eric's main concern was always helping children to widen their perspectives beyond the confines which their background, particularly their linguistic background, tends to impose upon them. He took part in a number of major inquiries into education. His involvement with the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants led to him setting up volunteer summer schools, in which children of ethnic minorities, and slow readers, were given individual tutors recruited from sixth-formers and university students.
Eric is regarded as the "father" of Language Awareness and, after his retirement from the University in 1979, he devoted his energies to that movement. "We are seeking to arm our pupils against fear of the unknown, which breeds prejudice and antagonism. Above all, we want to make our pupils' contacts with language, both their own and that of their neighbours, richer, more interesting, simply more fun." In 2002 the Association for Language Awareness elected him its first and sole Honorary Life Member and, as late as 2005, at the age of 90, he published a paper suggesting a "two-stage re-gearing of the school language apprenticeship".
Eric was a governor of CILT, president of the Modern Language Association and the first honorary president of what is now the British Association for Language Teaching. His broad concern with education was acknowledged with the award of a CBE in 1973.
The success of Erics imaginative ideas was due to the energetic way in which he converted them into action. Those of us who worked or studied with Eric were all at some stage inspired by him. We were also warmed by the generosity of his personality, his memory for the good in people and amnesia for the bad, his unaffected assumption of a large share of the work and a small share of the credit, his accessibility on the busiest of days, and his great kindness.