Interview
Michael Swan & Catherine Walter
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On Michael and Catherine
What has been your greatest satisfaction from working in the ELT industry?
CW: Can I have two? One would be the pleasure of putting people in touch with
one another: teachers from Russia with teachers from the UK; people teaching
Ethiopian refugees in Israel with people teaching East Asian refugees
in Thailand; the Literacy Strategy team of the UK's Department for Education
and Employment with EFL grammar experts.
And the other would be the buzz that I get when a teacher comes up after
a presentation and says, "I learned to teach from the teacher's
books to your courses." We put a lot of time and effort into those
teacher's books, trying to think carefully how to make them useful
to teachers in different situations, and I think it has made a small difference
to the profession.
MS: And three for me. Firstly, the fascination of working with language, humanity's
greatest and most complex invention. Secondly, the privilege of being
able to work with and for so many different kinds of people, with such
multifarious and endlessly engaging ways of thinking and being. And thirdly,
the satisfaction that comes from building bridges between the two –
from finding ways of helping people to succeed in that most difficult
of enterprises: learning to communicate well in a foreign language.
Finally, are there any projects you are pursuing
now? What do you see yourselves doing in 10 years time?
CW: I've just completed a PhD. I loved the research, in which I studied how
French learners of English transferred their first-language reading skills
to their second language. I've found out some fascinating things about
that, and about second language ‘working memory', which is the name
given to the set of cognitive systems that people use to manage complex
input. So one thing I'm doing is writing up that research into articles,
in order to disseminate what I've learnt.
Another recent project that has been fun is our
involvement in the UK's National Literacy Strategy. The NLS aims
to improve first-language literacy in primary schools. Michael and I are
on a small committee of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain that
has been advising the NLS team on the linguistic aspects of the Strategy,
and it's been very rewarding to put EFL skills and knowledge to work
in a first-language setting.
I'm also active as a member of the British
Council's English Language Advisory Committee - it's exciting
to see what the Council is doing worldwide and to help with the thinking
behind it. I have a special interest in English language teaching in Russia,
and I'm on the Council's EL advisory committee there too. The
way in which the Council is promoting ambitious cooperative projects between
groups of teachers separated by enormous distances in Russia is admirable.
Ten years' time? Ideally, teaching applied linguistics students somewhere
in Britain, transmitting to them the excitement I feel about language
and how we learn it; continuing my research into working memory and second
language acquisition; and working with teachers in developing countries
to help them write local materials for language learning.
MS: My current project is to become an ex-writer, and to start reading all
those books that stare reproachfully at me from my shelves (not to mention
listening to all those CDs and watching all those videos).
In ten years' time? I should be well placed
to start on a new venture. Look out for something ground-breaking on English
for geriatrics...
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