A history of Language and Linguistics at Essex Phil Brew
Andrew Radford
Dilly Meyer
John Roberts,
The beginnings
The Language Centre
“The knowledge of at least one foreign language is an essential qualification today for an increasing number of jobs.”
The first major appointment to the academic staff was Peter Strevens, who “was in at the very beginning of Applied Linguistics in Britain: Edinburgh 1957.” 2 This was the year when Edinburgh’s School of Applied Linguistics was established, where Strevens taught phonetics. In 1961, he moved to Leeds, before “the founding of the University of Essex in 1964 under a Vice-Chancellor from the Modern Languages field, Albert Sloman3 … resulted in his appointment to the Chair in Essex bearing for the first time anywhere the title of ‘Applied Linguistics’.”
The history of the Department of Language & Linguistics goes back to the University’s earliest days – indeed, it truly begins with these words from Albert Sloman’s 1963 Reith Lectures1 (which are surely even more true today). He went on to say:
“We propose, therefore, a new venture in language teaching, a languages centre, which will be independent of any department. It will begin by providing instruction in the principal languages, in French and German, and Russian and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, as well as English for foreign students.” Significantly, though, he also mentioned “the study of applied linguistics, especially new methods of teaching languages.” It was this idea – that an understanding of linguistics would support the teaching of modern languages – which formed the centre’s main role for its first ten years. It provided a service – teaching languages – but also taught an MA in the relatively new discipline of Applied Linguistics.
Another prominent appointment at the time was that of Hans Heinrich (known as David) Stern, a former refugee from 1930s Germany who taught the innovative Master’s program from 1964 to 1968 before decamping to Canada. They were joined by Arthur ‘Sam’ Spicer, who spent most of his career at Essex, and “felt … passionately” about “teacher training, foreign languages in the primary school, syllabus design, and ‘reasoned eclecticism’ in language teaching methods”4.
The 1960s One of Peter Strevens’ first staff appointments in 1964 was of Lawrence Michael ‘Paddy’ O’Toole, who had been teaching Russian at Manchester, and was put in charge of the teaching and development of Russian at Essex.
Wyn Johnson
Strevens, he says today, “had plans for a major research project into contemporary spoken and written Russian (no small challenge in view of political constraints in Moscow in the 1960s)”. O’Toole calls his Essex role “a distinct promotion”, and, in common with many early appointments, felt that “the revolutionary approach to university design, planning, structures and teaching proposed by Albert Sloman … was attractive on many counts.” In particular, he liked the fact that “language teaching [was] to be concentrated in a specialist Language Centre, [and would] not [be] a ‘poor relation’ of literary and historical studies.” Phil Brew, who joined in 1967, emphasises the importance of this structural innovation: “We do not have separate language departments, which are essentially literature departments, where the languages are taught as an annex to the study of literature. Essex broke away from that pattern and had a literature department, and as a corollary of that it had a department where the languages were taught at a practical level, but in the context of the study of language as an academic subject.” The cross-disciplinary atmosphere was a factor, too, in tempting O’Toole to join the staff, as was “the promotion of Russian, Spanish and Portuguese as the major languages to be taught from scratch as a
change from French, German and Italian”. Early lecturer Richard Ogle5 remembers that the methods used to teach languages were innovative, too: “The LC used a language lab, a relatively radical idea at the time.” Halliday vs. Chomsky “Peter Strevens,” O’Toole says now, “put me in touch with the linguistic theories of M.A.K. Halliday which were the basis for the Russian Analysis Project. They also underpinned my own research work … and the BBC radio Russian courses which my colleagues and I were commissioned to publish and broadcast.”6 For anyone unfamiliar with the work of these two eminent linguists, the simplest explanation might be that provided by IH, the International House Journal of Education and Development:
“Chomsky believes that language is innate; Halliday believes that it is learned. Chomsky believes that all human beings possess a grammatical programme hardwired into the brain; Halliday does not – he believes that grammar mirrors function and is mastered through experience. Chomsky believes in ‘Universal Grammar’; Halliday does not.”7 1968 and all that No history of Essex seems to be complete without some mention of the ‘troubles’, and one member of the Language Centre played a small but significant part in the events of May 1968. A week after the protest against Dr Inch, the speaker from Porton Down – which led to the suspension of David Triesman, Peter Archard and Raphael Halberstadt – Albert Sloman addressed a meeting of students and staff. “The student newspaper wrote that, “The question was always ‘are you right?’ and the answer always ‘I am authority’.” Sloman kept trying to persuade the staff and students that the authority felt this or that as though he alone was the university, until Peter Wexler, a lecturer in Linguistics, stood up and said “Vice Chancellor, you do not understand. We are the University.””8
(“I suspect,” Phil Brew says today, “that is probably why Peter Wexler never got a Chair,” although Andrew Radford disagrees: “Appointments committees are not guided by such considerations – indeed there would be uproar if anyone attempted to introduce such considerations.”) Some years later, Dilly Meyer remembers, Peter Wexler was head of department, and “you had to go through the secretary’s office to see him. She would intercept anyone who came along, and at the time Albert Sloman had a lookalike in the form of a security guard [they wore very similar grey suits]. So, she opened the door to Peter’s office, and said, ’ere, it’s that security guard to see you, and it was the ViceChancellor.”
1970s By the 1970s, O’Toole says, the MA programmes in Applied Linguistics and Theoretical Linguistics showed the Centre’s “strong bias towards Chomskyan linguistics”, but “when Michael Halliday … and his wife Ruqaiya Hasan were appointed to a professorship and senior lectureship in the dept. (late 1973, I think), I was delighted with this adjustment of the balance between linguistic theories, and by the influx of bright postgraduate research students.” Becoming a department The next major development in the Language Centre’s life was announced with very little fanfare in the University of Essex ‘Reporter’9 in August 1974:
Alteration to the title of the Language Centre Council, on the recommendation of the Senate, has agreed that, with effect from 1 October 1974, the Language Centre will be known as the Department of Language and Linguistics, on the strict understanding that this change in status and title does not affect the language teaching role at present undertaken by the Language Centre in a service capacity to the School of Comparative Studies.
For the previous three years, the Centre’s Chair, Sam Spicer, had been promoting the idea of this change. Paddy O’Toole was his successor, and says now: “The inauguration of the MA schemes in the late 1960s had confirmed the place of linguistic theory in our work, putting us on a par with Literary Theory, Art Theory, Philosophy, etc. which were growing disciplines.” According to Spicer’s former colleague John Roberts, “Undoubtedly, Sam’s most significant contribution to teaching was made … at Essex. Many alumni of his … went on to occupy leading positions in the language teaching and applied linguistics world and indeed became known, not least at the instigation of Sam’s old friend Peter Strevens, as the ‘Essex mafia’.”10 Paddy O’Toole took over from Sam at the beginning of the 1974-75 academic year, inheriting the new department. (The timing of this transition means, of course, that, in 2014 – as Essex celebrates its 50th anniversary – Language and Linguistics will celebrate two neatly coinciding birthdays of its own: the 50th anniversary of its inception, and the 40th of becoming a department.) When the change was made, Essex was coming to the end of its student unrest days, which had coloured its reputation. So much so, that Emeritus Professor Martin Atkinson11 readily confesses now: “I came because I needed a job. Did I want to come here? Not particularly! Not long before we came here, Rhodes Boyson, who was the Tory Education Secretary at the time, was actually proposing that the place be closed and turned into an agricultural college, I think. I said to my wife, ‘Five years at the most, and then we’ll go somewhere else.’ But things changed.” When Martin joined, “It was largely a service department providing language support for two very prestigious undergraduate programmes at the time; one in Latin American Studies, which still exists, and one in Russian Studies. When I came, every single appointment to the Language Centre and subsequently to the dept. for a couple of years was – with the exception of me – someone who could teach a language and had
some interest in linguistics.” Martin’s view is borne out by the memories of John Hawkins, now Emeritus Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge. “I was at Essex from 1973-77, and I believe my precise title was ‘Lecturer in German and Linguistics’. I recall developing new undergraduate degree programs combining languages with linguistics, and writing a detailed undergraduate booklet at the time.”
few universities doing languages without doing literature.” Wyn adds: “I know one or two people who went to Cambridge to do languages, and they said you do languages in the first year and after that you do lots of literature and nothing else. And they send people abroad from those universities to try to get them learning the language, because they weren’t learning it at the university. We were actually quite good in that respect.”
Andrew Radford adds: “Degrees in French would have a large component of French linguistics, including courses on French phonology, morphology, syntax, and text analysis. When I was first appointed [1978], Mike Jones and Roger Hawkins were appointed to teach French and the linguistics of French. They were actually doing French language teaching as well. I was doing linguistics, and some French linguistics as well. That was still the tradition in the department.”
Something about the department certainly resonated with Wyn, because she graduated in 1980 and never left. “I know the main reason I stayed,” she says, “and moved fully into linguistics (phonology), having originally studied French, was the excellent teaching of Jacques Durand.” She also remembers Dave Kilby “with great fondness”, and confesses that his teaching meant “I nearly went over to syntax. Luckily I didn’t, as there are rather a lot of syntacticians in the department.”
One departure from tradition in the 1970s was the establishment of the EFL Unit, providing English language teaching and short courses for international students. Headed initially by Jo McDonough, it became the English Language Teaching Centre and is now the International Academy, and a department in its own right.
For Mike Jones, what made Essex distinctive was that “language departments fell into three broad categories: traditional language and literature departments; the former polytechnics – places like Salford, Bradford, Aston and so on – which were practically and vocationally minded, combining languages with business studies; whereas the distinctive feature of Essex was that it was looking at language both as a skill and as an object of enquiry at the same time.”
Not literature A major part of the department’s focus at the time, says Andrew today, was “to offer degree schemes that were different from the classic language and literature degree schemes. Our thing was to attract students who hated literature. You interviewed them, and said, ‘Why do you want to do a degree in linguistics?’ [and the answer was] ‘Because I hate literature’ not ‘because I love linguistics’. [It was]: ‘I don’t know anything about linguistics. I’m sure it’s going to be much more interesting than literature.’ So, for a long time we were very successful in selling them something very different from the kind of thing they’d done at A-level – French language and literature, or whatever.” Former students Dilly Meyer and Wyn Johnson12 insist that they actively wanted to study languages – but Dilly concedes: “It was one of the
The social 70s Mike also remembers the department of the 70s being “a lot smaller, and there was a lot more of a social identity. We used to have a soirée musicale once a year. The head of department when I joined, Peter Wexler, was very interested in music and discovered that one or two people in the department were amateur musicians, so he held a party at his house at which people would bring along their instruments and do a little recital.” As the event grew, “it was actually timetabled to coincide with the arrival of exchange students from Lille, and it had the advantage that they would bring bottles of their duty-free allowance of wine over. It was probably illegal, actually, because I think we sold the stuff afterwards.”
Dilly Meyer also remembers this aspect of her undergraduate days fondly. “There was very much an atmosphere of study and care. A lot of the lecturers were also advisers, and each adviser had an allowance which allowed them to entertain their advisees, often inviting them home for a party. That’s one of my memories, going to John Roberts’ house, and we would have a picnic and some wine and talk to each other, and meet other students from our department who weren’t necessarily on the same course. So you got to integrate and know people and know your lecturers.” One of those lecturers was the fondly remembered John Ross, the author of the BBC’s French courses, who had what was – even by the 70s – an interesting attitude to the apparent health benefits of tobacco.
Talking newspapers Another development in the 1970s was not connected with the department’s work, but did use its equipment. “Forty years ago,” says Phil Brew, “I started up something called the Talking Newspaper. It first started in Wales. Colchester was the first in England. There are over 500 local groups now. “It started in Language and Linguistics for an interesting reason, in that the University was still being built. We moved into the new wing, and there was a purpose-built studio for language material and phonetics, but it was deemed not up to standard. For a pukka recording studio, you shouldn’t have any electrical wiring because that can interfere with the equipment. The University was expanding, and they took the opportunity to build another one. The first one became more or less redundant, so when the talking newspaper was set up, that became our studio for many years.” Talking newspapers are still recorded on the Colchester Campus – now in a studio “down in the bottom of the RAB Butler building.” Perhaps most importantly, though, “It’s always been a joint town-gown thing; always had a lot of people from outside the University contribute to it.”
Doug Arnold
Louisa Sadler
At half-time during staff-student football matches, Wyn Johnson remembers, “He had a packet of cigarettes in his pocket that he’d bring out and say ‘have a cigarette’, and I’d say, well not in the middle of a football match, really John.” This recollection prompts Dilly to recall “walking back after a class, and I said I’ve just been to the dentist and had a filling, and he said, ‘Oh, come into the office and have a cigarette, it’ll make you feel so much better.’ “The other thing I remember about him was, in the days when you could park under the podia, having all the stuff for a party in the back of his car and his clean laundry [next to it], and a coach driver not putting his handbrake on and going into the back of John’s car. He wasn’t upset about the car at all. He was upset that the laundry had been ruined and that we hadn’t got food and drink for the night.” Postgraduate 70s Doug Arnold arrived in the late 70s “to do a Master’s. In those days, there were three MAs: applied linguistics, theoretical linguistics and phonetics. I came to do theoretical linguistics.” He goes on to point out: “The year before me, Andy Spencer13 had done it. He’s now a professor in the department. The year before him, Steve Pullman had done it. Steve is a professor of computational linguistics at Oxford. The year before him, I think, Graham Ritchie did it. He was a professor in Edinburgh until he retired. Two years after me, Louisa Sadler did the MA, and she is a professor in the department. This place turned out a lot of good people over many years.” Wyn Johnson also took this MA, and adds: “I think I’m the last person to have done this particular MA (as well as the PhD) who is still a permanent member of staff here.”
Andrew Spencer
Roger Hawkins
1980s The late 70s and much of the 80s were what Andrew Radford describes as a “period of Romance glory”. Citing the names of Mike Jones, Peter Wexler, phonologist Jacques Durand, Spanish linguist Juan Delacruz and Iggy Roca, a Spanish morpho-phonologist, he says, “we had probably the best collection of French linguists in the UK at the time – perhaps even one of the best collection of Romance linguists. We published substantive tomes between us. My Italian Syntax had been published in 1977; Mike Jones published Sardinian Syntax (highly regarded as a research monograph) and French Syntax (a good textbook-cum-monograph with lots of original analyses). And Jacques Durand also published actively.” Modern languages “In the 1980s,” says Andrew Radford, “Modern Languages modules in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian contributed to degrees in languages, in Language and Linguistics, and to Area Studies degrees (European Studies, Latin American Studies and Russian Studies).” “The Russian course,” Doug says, “was very important, because speaking Russian was a guarantee of a job, pretty much. When the Berlin Wall came down, that collapsed in about two years, completely. When the Olympics had been in Moscow [in 1984], the BBC put on a Russian course for people to learn a bit of Russian, and the author of that was Terry Culhane, who was a lecturer in this department. Dave Kilby came here because of the Russian. He taught Russian linguistics to people learning Russian, and he died tragically young, in his 30s. He would have been a really dominant figure.”
Mike Jones
“He was interested in the Soviet Union as well as Russia,” Phil Brew adds. “In those days, to a lot of people, Russia and the Soviet Union were more or less synonymous. I remember Dave pointing out the number of countries in the old Soviet Union that each had their own language and culture and so on, and I think people had little idea of that in those days. He had a bright career ahead of him.” Other notable names in the 80s were Keith and Gillian Brown. They had, Keith says now, “been in Edinburgh for about 20 years and needed a change. Our children had finished secondary school and were all going to universities in England. Essex advertised two senior posts!” Keith was Head of Department from 198487, but when Gillian left to become the founding professor at the Cambridge Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics in 1988, Keith “was given the opportunity to take up visiting professorships in Europe”. He accepted, but – citing the “dedicated, intelligent and thoughtful staff” – says, “I have often wondered whether I ought not to have stayed, as I much enjoyed my time in Essex.” Machines Much of Louisa Sadler’s and Doug’s time in the early 80s was taken up with Eurotra. In the late 1970s, the European Commission had begun to fund a machine translation project which aimed to develop a system which would allow all the EU’s citizens to read the Commission’s proceedings in their own language (one of the EU’s founding principles). Research took place in teams across the member countries, and while it wasn’t ultimately possible to create a machine that could translate into and out of all nine (at the time) EU languages, it increased skills in computational linguistics across Europe – and forged links between researchers in the field. In the
Commission’s own words, “the creation of a very coherent community of computational linguists in every country of the European Community is a very considerable achievement.”14 In fact, Eurotra was only one element in what former head of department Yorick Wilks describes as “a major centre of Computational Linguistics in the late 70s/early 80s. We had other grants as well, and we had undergraduate teaching, MAs and quite a lot of PhD students in the area.” Sadly, this didn’t last. “I left to go to Computer Science across the square, largely because it was too hard work getting such technology grants in a humanities department. It was much easier in CS, I’m afraid.” Noel Sharkey, who has found fame in robotics, says “I worked on computational machine learning techniques for language processing. I became concerned about trying to teach language to machines without them having access to the world. I wanted to move into robotics, so when I was offered a job as a reader in computer science at Exeter (my alma mater), I sadly moved on.” That choice of word is telling, and Sharkey speaks for many former staff and students when he adds: “I say sadly because it was … a great department for intellectual debate. I was often standing in the corridor for an hour or more arguing about some aspect of semantics.” Yorick agrees, saying: “Language and Linguistics was part of the Essex Cognitive Studies Centre which for a while linked Lang-Ling and the CS Department (and bits of Philosophy and Electronic Engineering) in a stimulating relationship.” Erasmus Another development which came about as a result of European money was the formalisation of a scheme to send students studying languages abroad for a year. Phil Brew was coordinator of the Erasmus15 programme, and says, “The introduction of the year abroad was a big step forward, because initially we started our languages degree schemes with a requirement for a few weeks abroad in the summer. Then we introduced the fourth year, and integrated it into the assessment. I think it was really with
the Erasmus programme [in 1987] that it became integrated.” Language and Linguistics and the Department of Law were pioneers of the fouryear degree with one year abroad, which is now open to all Essex students. RAE success Perhaps the biggest news in the 80s, though, was the first Research Assessment Exercise, the results of which were published in 1986. Six of Essex’s 15 departments were rated ‘outstanding’ – including Language and Linguistics. Mike Jones recalls: “Within the university, that put us on the map. We had been perceived as not quite an academic department, but really a place where they taught languages, and there’s this linguistics stuff that goes on. I think particularly within Social Sciences – you know, Sociology, Economics, Government have always had this reputation – and then, all of a sudden, Linguistics comes out with a five-star rating in the first assessment exercise, and I think people looked at us [and said], ‘Oh, they do some serious stuff in that department after all.’” Mike had arrived, it should be pointed out, a full four years after the centre became a department, and recalls that in his early years, “in the days when we used to get memos rather than e-mails, a lot of them would still be addressed to the Language Centre”. This is believed to have stopped now, although Dilly Meyer says, “There used to be this assumption that you could contact the linguistics department, no matter who you were in the University, and they would instantly be able to translate something. People would ring you up, and I’d say, ‘we teach English in the EFL unit’.” (Wyn Johnson says she found herself being thought of as “the person who knew how to pronounce people’s names at the graduation ceremony”.)
Adaptation and change Albert Sloman’s departure in 1987 brought a new Vice-Chancellor to Essex, and the man appointed, Martin Harris, happened to be a professor of linguistics. For Andrew Radford, who decamped to Bangor in 1980, this was one of many reasons to return – another was “a disastrous RAE score at Bangor. I remember writing to Martin at the time, saying this leaves me with very little choice but to leave, and he wrote back saying that’s precisely the point of the RAE, to get the good people to go to good places.” (To be strictly accurate, the government of the time instituted the exercise to give it a guide as to where to allocate its diminishing education budget.) Andrew Radford’s memories of Harris are of a man who “takes instant decisions. I remember [once], three days before the Easter vacation, I sent him a message saying things were going pretty well, I’m sure we could make even more money if we had a chair in psycholinguistics and a senior post in sociolinguistics as well. Martin was about to go off on a tour of Africa or whatever, and his secretary rang me saying: Martin’s done a reply for you. He’d photocopied the letter and put ‘approved, approved’ on the margin. Can you imagine? It doesn’t happen like that any more. So, one of the reasons I stayed here was it was very reactive. You could get stuff done very quickly. Now, it has to go to a sub-committee of the faculty and then the faculty and then … all sorts of quality controls.” This chimes very much with what Director of Latin American Studies Gladis García-Soza says about the department’s strengths. “It’s a chameleon. It’s not static. It responds. It follows positive trends and initiates change. Those are things you need to do to survive.”
The ‘lightwell’ Memories of Martin Harris’s decisiveness are not always happy ones, however. Mike Jones still misses the ‘lightwell’. “When I first arrived, the department was mainly where the International Academy is, and where the IA social space is now was the ‘lightwell’, an open space that went right up to skylights in the roof, a bit like an inside garden. It was [in the 1970s and early 80s] a gathering point for us, but also for the Humanities and Social Sciences faculties. They used to serve coffee at 11 o’clock and 4 o’clock. Unfortunately – and this was Martin Harris’ decision – we were short of teaching space, and someone thought what a good idea it would be to put floors in that.”
Mike Jones adds: “When I first came here, we were predominantly a theoretical linguistics department. I think we’ve become much broader. We made appointments in sociolinguistics, notably Peter Trudgill [at Essex 1986-93], who was probably the main British socio-linguist at the time, and some PhD students of his
have got jobs here. Similarly, we built up a very strong reputation in psycho-linguistics.” Phil Brew calls Trudgill “one of the most famous socio-linguists this country has produced,” and remembers that he began as a dialectologist: “He came from Norwich and his first research was into the Norfolk dialect.”
between two and four languages. This created the impetus to develop specialist cinema and culture modules, for example, taught in the relevant language. We also developed joint ML degrees with Philosophy, Politics, Drama, Film Studies, English Language, Linguistics, TEFL and so on.”
Why Essex?
1990s
Asked why they came here, some of the academics interviewed for this history gave fascinating and occasionally entertaining answers…
One significant development in 1980s and 90s was “the focus on language acquisition,” says Roger Hawkins today, citing Andrew Radford’s Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax (Blackwell, 1990) and Martin Atkinson’s Explanations in the Study of Child Language Development (CUP, 1982). “Those were influential books. Then one of our new colleagues, Harald Clahsen, organised an international conference in Wivenhoe House round about 1994-95 where we brought a lot of international researchers in language acquisition. That gave a really interesting and stimulating impetus to further work.” Or, as Andrew Radford puts it: “In the mid-90s, Essex was one of the best places for acquisition research in the UK.”
Another development was to refocus the existing BA Language Studies. “Over the years,” says Andrew, “BA Modern Languages and BA Language Studies have been the steadiest recruiters of languages students. At the same time, unshackling Linguistics from Modern Languages meant that Linguistics was free to develop new degrees appealing to the lucrative English Language market, and to market them through a separate entry in the prospectus. Two of these new degrees (BA English Language, and BA English Language and Linguistics) became our main recruiters at undergraduate level.”
Gladis Garcia-Soza: I was a political exile from Chile in 1975. There was a scholarship here for my then husband. I had a degree in languages with a major in English Mike Jones: I nearly didn’t come here. I was interviewed at Salford and didn’t get it, but the Head of Department was Martin Harris, subsequently our V-C. He said there might be another post coming up, and I would stand a good chance. In the meantime I was offered this post at Essex on a one-year basis. Martin Harris then phoned up almost the day after and said “We’ve got this post at Salford, you can have it.” I said, well, I’ve got myself committed to Essex. Knowing what I know now about selection procedures, I might have thought twice about it, but actually Essex was the place that suited me. Roger Hawkins: I was working in a French department in Sheffield, which was very literary. I was the only linguist, and I wanted to come to an environment where there were other linguists. Doug Arnold: Back then, there were four or five places with very strong reputations. Essex was one of them. I was very impressed by the man who interviewed me here, Martin Atkinson – and I had a girlfriend in London. So, all the best reasons. Martin Atkinson: In 1973/4, there were three jobs in linguistics in the country, and three of us worked on a research project in Edinburgh, and we got the three jobs. I was the last to get one. I think it went Lancaster, York, here, in order. My two colleagues got the first two. By the third one, my colleagues were out of the running, so I got the job here.
Andrew Spencer (above left) also cites this as a significant area of the department’s work, and refers to Andrew Radford, Roger Hawkins, Doug Arnold and Louisa Sadler as “the nucleus for the most successful aspects of the research effort in the department. They were able to attract very impressive colleagues to come and join them, including Harald Clahsen (now at Potsdam) and Bob Borsley, and more recently Florence Myles and Monika Schmid as well as a host of very talented younger colleagues in recent years. The combination of expertise that we have is not easy to find elsewhere.” Losing the shackles There were also changes for the language side of the department in the 90s. As Andrew Radford, then head of department, puts it: “Students wanted to study something ‘relevant’ rather than hard core theoretical linguistics. So, the time had come to free Modern Languages (ML) from the shackles of Linguistics and to set up a pure ML degree which allowed students to study
Graduate linguistics These initiatives saw changes to the graduate programme, too, beginning with the MA in Applied Linguistics (AL). “More than half the content had been theoretical,” Andrew says, “which most AL students enjoyed as much as castor oil. We restructured it so that only one out of eight components would be an obligatory dollop of linguistic theory. We also developed specialist MA programmes in Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Acquisition, Syntax, Phonology etc. “The idea was that most students by the time they reach graduate level have a particular specialism in mind, and want a programme on which at least half the modules are in their chosen specialism.” In addition, around half the modules on a degree scheme would be options, “so that students could choose what they do (and don’t) want to do. Within three years, we had gone from admitting 35 [Masters] students a year to admitting 100 (with a peak in subsequent years of around 140), and the level has remained pretty constant at around 100 a year since.” There are drawbacks to leadership, however. Martin Atkinson says today that “these innovations we introduced put us ahead – until the
other guys caught up.” Andrew explains: “At one time, we were the only university in the UK to offer an MA in syntax. Then University College London thought, ‘this is a good idea, we can do this and we have more syntacticians than they have’. The language acquisition MA was unique, but then Durham decided that was a good idea.”
2000 and beyond The last decade or so has seen considerable growth in the area of vocational degrees and study modules – including the BA Modern Languages and Professional Skills – and, in Roger Hawkins’ words, “our new departure into translation and interpreting, both for European languages and Chinese-English. That’s going to be one of our big recruiters for the next 10 years.” The new Translation MA is “highly vocational,” he says. “Unlike traditional Master’s degrees, where you have taught modules, and then a very theoretical dissertation, the modules they take are usually practising translation and interpreting. Then, for their dissertation, they do a project – they either translate a book, or they set up some interpreting scenario, usually a mock conference where they do simultaneous translation; or they do a subtitling project, they get some video and subtitle it. “The theoretical bit is writing a commentary about the problems of translation, interpretation and
Author: Chris Coates, a communications officer in the University’s Communications and External Relations (CER) section, based on original research and interviews with some of the principal people (past and present) in the Department.
subtitling. The idea is that when they finish, they should have the practical skills to enable them to go almost immediately into professional translation, interpretation and subtitling. Many will work for a company, liaising between [for example] the Chinese client and the UK business. If they’re really good – a very small proportion of interpreters can do this – they can go on to glamorous jobs as simultaneous translators at the UN, or the European Commission. Before that, in the area of foreign languages, we were largely a practical language teaching department. The idea was to build up the skills of largely English speakers in French, German, Spanish. So this is quite a significant departure.” These years have also seen “the introduction of extracurricular provision,” says Andrew Radford. “We first introduced the idea of students paying to take LA modules outside their curriculum 15 or more years ago, and a couple of years later, this was institutionalised as the Open Language Programme (directed by Annie Callaghan). “Alongside this has grown up the new Languages for All programme (an initiative of former V-C Colin Riordan, as was the Translation MA).” Alex Burdumy, Languages for All Coordinator, says of this initiative: “We want to give students skills for today’s world. Employers are not satisfied with the language skills and cultural awareness many UK graduates have. There’s a second
4. From an obituary by John Roberts, BAAL Newsletter 30, Summer 1988 5. Now author of Smart World, Harvard Business School Press, 2007 6. BBC Radio 3, 1965-68; republished as Passport to Moscow (1972) and Passport to Odessa (1974) Oxford University Press
Notes
7. http://ihjournal.com/michael-halliday-at80-a-tribute
1. A University in the Making: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/thereith-lectures/transcripts/1960/#y1963
8. Caroline M Hoefferle, British Student Activism in the Long Sixties, Routledge 2013
2. British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Newsletter 35, Spring 1990, obituary by Stephen ‘Pit’ Corder.
9. Our staff magazine in the 1960s/’70s
3. Sloman had previously been the Gilmour Chair of Spanish at Liverpool
11. Interviewed for his job in the Language Centre in the academic year 1973-74, he joined – after the summer holiday – a department.
10. BAAL Newsletter 30, Summer 1988
level to communication, and when you learn a new language, you learn different etiquette, too. It [also] aids literacy and gives you a better understanding of your own language and culture.”16 Present day Asked to sum up the department today, Doug Arnold says “You could think of us as two departments. When I first came here, almost everybody who taught linguistics also taught a language. One of the things that’s happened is that the two parts of the department separated increasingly.” This is borne out by Corinne Girard (left), Director of French Studies and Modern Languages. “Lecturers who were doing research into one specific area of linguistics,” she says, “drifted away from practical language teaching.” Nonetheless, Doug says, “we try to cover the whole discipline. We’re the biggest and the best. That’s not quite true, but there’s about 40-odd staff, about 15 of whom are modern language teachers, which still gives us a substantial number of linguists. So we’re nowhere near as big as Edinburgh – they’re the biggest linguistics department, but if you add modern languages in as well, we’re bigger – perhaps. Also, Scotland is a different country. So the claim that we’re the biggest and the best is not entirely true, but it’s not entirely false, either.”
12. Now manager of the University Skills Centre (Dilly) and Undergraduate Linguistics Co-ordinator, 1st Year Linguistics Director and Study Abroad Officer (Wyn) 13. Andrew Spencer: “In fact, I cajoled the department to let me sign on straightaway for a PhD, without having to undergo the discipline of the MA (we would never let this happen now!). However, I spent my first year attending MA classes.” 14. Final evaluation of the results of Eurotra, 1994: http://aei.pitt.edu/36888/ 15. EuRopean Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students – a ‘backronym’ (a phrase specially constructed so that an acronym fits an existing word). Now part of the EU’s Lifelong Learning Programme. 16. Wyvern, October 2012: http://www.essex.ac.uk/wyvern/documents/ october_12.pdf