Interview

Ronald Carter

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You have written over forty books and one hundred articles in the applied linguistics field. How do you find ways to motivate yourself as a teacher, lecturer and researcher? What do you see as the relationship between research and teaching? Do you have any suggestions for teachers doing research?
In terms of my own work in applied linguistics, I am interested in literary linguistics, in applied linguistics and language teaching, in corpus linguistics and in the differences between spoken grammars and written grammars. I am lucky in that as an academic researcher, I have a lot of time to study many of these things. Now you ask what would I suggest for teachers to do as research. I think there are two things.

First I think it is very important always for teachers to look closely at language. The best language teachers are those who have most language awareness. So they can learn from the grammars and publications and corpora that are now available, but they must also trust their own instinct, trust their own capacity to analyze language, to choose their own text to teach their students. It is very important that teachers are not only aware of existing research, but also develop their competence and confidence to undertake their own research, to investigate language themselves and collect examples of the language from magazines, from newspapers, from all kinds of sources which they then say are theirs, not something that someone else gives them, but something they have developed themselves for their students. So becoming a language investigator, I think, is very important as a part of research that teachers might undertake.

The second thing, I think, that teachers must try to do is to become very good observers of their own classrooms, action researchers in their own classrooms. They haven't got time to collect a 5 million-word corpus; that is something academic researchers have the time to do. But teachers have a lot of time to observe the language of their students, to record the language of their students, to transcribe the language of their students, to better understand what their students' difficulties are in trying to learn English. And make them know some needs and set up questions, investigate these questions and become explorers of their own classrooms, become experts in their own classrooms. That is very important for the teachers to do, because they should not always rely on things that come from outside. They must know what is there, they must know what is outside, but the most important thing is to develop what is inside, inside themselves as teachers and inside their own classrooms so that they can become investigators, researchers and explorers in their own right.

What are your goals in your term as Chair of BAAL?
One of the things I have been doing recently is leading the British Association for Applied Linguistics as Chair. I think the goals are again to try to get balance in applied linguistics. We must have a better balance between psychological approaches and social approaches, between different modes of learning. So BAAL is an organization that is made up of 700 members with different experiences, different backgrounds and different traditions. And it is important therefore that we respect and try to integrate those traditions so that we can better understand how different approaches contribute to successful language learning and successful study of language and better understanding of language.

It is politically important that BAAL becomes more powerful nationally so that applied linguistics gets a larger share of research grants, and it is better represented on research bodies and research assessment in this country. It is a discipline that is still very new, still very recent. Linguistics has a longer history, but applied linguistics has a quite recent history. It is a quite new discipline that is still finding its feet. So I want to try to develop the organization and help it to mature as an organization. Those are my two main goals.

The third main goal is to try to encourage younger academics, younger applied linguists to fulfill their potential as teachers, learners, researchers and representatives of the field.

Away from the educational field and CANCODE, how do you spend the remainder of your time? What hobbies do you engage in?
I don't have time for hobbies, too busy really. But when I spend time, my family is really social time. I have a daughter who is at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is studying psychology. So my wife and I try to make time each year to go to visit her in the United States. My other two children live in Nottingham, so they live a lot nearer. Therefore we try to spend time together with the family, but I wouldn't call it a hobby. Because I am working seven days a week, I find that work is my hobby and my hobby is my work. I think a lot of people find that. I enjoy doing what I do. And therefore if you enjoy it and find it fulfilling, then in one sense, it is also a hobby.

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