Interview
Michael Swan & Catherine Walter
Michael Swan and Catherine Walter are co-authors of several books and courses
including The New Cambridge English Course, How English Works and Good Grammar Book.
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On ELT
ELT: When and how did you get involved in English language teaching?
MS: Purely by accident. In the early 1960s I was doing post-graduate work
on some neglected 18th-century German poets, and I got a part-time job
at an Oxford language school to earn a bit of extra money. As time went
on I found myself enjoying the teaching more and more. I also came to
realise with increasing clarity just why the poets were neglected, and
just how little talent I had for literary research. The next step was
inevitable.
CW: After university in Texas, I went to Paris and did my second degree in
linguistics and French literature at the Sorbonne. After that, it seemed
a good idea to get some experience teaching English as a foreign language
before going home, so I enrolled for a certificate course at International
House in Paris. Somehow I never managed to go home.
How has the ELT scene changed since you started in the profession?
CW: Mostly in terms of the materials available, I think. When I began teaching,
classroom materials were thin on the ground, and creating materials for
classes took up a lot more of teachers' time than it does now. This gives
today's teachers a great start - they can see lots of examples of good
practice and look at how to build on it. In fact, in many cases, good
materials have led professional developments. For example, the growth
of interest in learner independence would not have taken off as it has
without the excellent self-study books, CDs, readers and so on that are
available today.
Another important difference is the mutual
recognition and respect that has developed over the last ten years or
so between teachers based in English-speaking countries and those based
outside those countries. When I began teaching there was a certain amount
of arrogance on both sides (I was told at my interview for the certificate
course at IH that the knowledge I had gained from my French university
linguistics course would be of no use at all!). In many cases this arrogance
is giving way to respect, communication, and cross-fertilisation between
different pedagogical traditions, and this enriches us all.
MS: Things have changed enormously. When I started there was very little in
the way of professional training; we learnt on the job. English teaching
consisted mainly of teaching grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, with
some added fluency practice. Textbooks were pretty unattractive. Applied
Linguistics was in its infancy. The buzz-words from the research front
were 'structural syllabus', 'audio-visual' and 'language
laboratory'. Professional associations scarcely existed.
All this
has changed, mostly for the better. There is excellent professional training.
We have a wealth of good textbooks. Applied Linguistics is a long-established
and productive field of research. We are supported by several very professional
professional associations. Language teaching now has so many components
that it's difficult to list them all.
One thing that worries me,
though, is that language itself (especially grammar and pronunciation)
has tended to disappear from language teaching, at least in the UK-based
orthodoxy of the last twenty years. Learning a foreign language centrally
involves learning the key structures, phonology and vocabulary of that
language, and no amount of activity-based fluency practice can compensate
if that is neglected.
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