A life in the public service

Was it unusual for people of your background to go to university?

I wouldn't want to romanticise a working-class background because my living conditions were lower middle class rather than working class, particularly because of the intellectual and moral lifestyle influence of my mother. I think the form of socialism to which we were attached and its rooting in a Christian ethic meant that having been given these opportunities from a very humble background, I then should devote my life to the public service. The decision to continue to university was made easy and the pathway was smooth. It seemed to me obvious, and to people around me it was also obvious, that we were in a very privileged position. The country was supporting our education and we needed to give something back. I and the other people in the very small sixth form all finished up in the world of education. One of the five of us that kept closely in touch became professor of mathematics at King's College London; another became senior tutor of Ruskin College Oxford; another became chief education officer of Ealing; and the other disappeared under the hill in General Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham and recently had a plaque given to him for having invented the system of cryptography which is now generally in use for internet security. I benefited enormously from the grammar school system and can attest to its effect on social mobility. It didn't require a great deal of decision-making for me to follow my natural interest and bent in foreign languages from the lower school into the sixth form and then to university.

University College London and phonetics

When I left the army I took the civil service examinations and could have gone into the administrative grade, either in the diplomatic service or the home civil service, but I was so attached to university life that I declined those and continued with my university degree. And then in 1949 something happened that couldn't conceivably happen at any other time. Although he was of good retirement age, Daniel Jones came out of retirement in the latter part of the war and had to re-establish the Department of Phonetics because it had more or less disintegrated. He had undertaken the teaching of German phonetics himself, and when he retired in 1949 he hadn't trained anybody to replace him. I had expected to go on to research in German literature, but I was suddenly given the opportunity of going straight on to the academic staff in phonetics. I was given a year to pick up the trade – a year which I spent largely reading through the history of phonetics, particularly of German phonetics. I also sat at the feet of J. R. Firth as well as following the various courses in phonetics – French phonetics with Hélène Coustenoble, instrumental phonetics with Dennis Fry and Peter Denes, and the classical work on English phonetics and particularly intonation, which was very much in focus, with G. F. Arnold, A. C. Gimson and J. D. O'Connor.

The influence of J. R. Firth

Could you say a bit more about J. R. Firth and his influence?

I've often thought that Firth was more a prophet than a scholar – his published work doesn't reflect the power and influence of his lectures. The importance of his work lay not in technical linguistics, in which he wasn't very strong, but in what he had got from his cooperation with Malinowski in anthropological linguistics. He had a very strong sense of history (he was a historian originally, not a language man) and laughed at the idea that linguistics was a recent invention. He took it right back to the Sumerians and then through the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Renaissance, and on through the eighteenth century to the first great revolution (the historical school at the beginning of the nineteenth century), which wiped out all memory of anything that had gone before it, and then through to Paul and the New Grammarians. He wasn't so keen on de Saussure and he was not at all keen on American Structuralism, but he was strong on the earlier periods that tended to get overlooked. He was also very strong on the ubiquity of language in human life and getting away from the idea that it was simply a coding – for him it was a way of life. That I found very attractive. The courses that I gave in linguistics reflected that – they had a strong historical interest; and I always started by trying to raise students’ awareness of the ubiquity of language in human life and the way in which the different forms it takes correspond to the requirements of situations.

Firth's influence was in some ways positive but in others negative. He was very much a power man. He dominated the Board of Studies in London. Dennis Fry was the only member of the UCL department on the Board of Studies, and we felt it was not possible to get a higher degree without subscribing in detail to his approach – only one member of staff in the Phonetics Department tried to get a higher degree. There was very little academic contact between the departments at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) and UC. On one occasion an attempt was made to run a joint seminar to which each could present its work. At the first meeting, Fry opened proceedings by saying: ‘We can all agree, I imagine, that what we are basically interested in is investigating what happens when people talk to each other’. Firth exploded: ‘No, we are not interested in that at all’. The meeting was soon brought to an end, and though one or two further meetings were held, they did not result in a meeting of minds! I remember that Firth had a thing against the word ‘cheerio’, so one knew that when saying goodbye to Firth one must not say ‘cheerio’. And of course the effect of that was to make ‘cheerio’ come out automatically.

Daniel Jones's approach, which still dominated thinking in the Phonetics Department, was that you should not bother about examinations but publish. In his opinion, you shouldn't read too much because reading, he thought, interfered with perception. If you read what other people had written about the phonetics of other languages, you were likely to follow that rather than using your own trained ear. The members of the department were very strong on their personal training in the perception of sounds, in the ability to observe, note and analyse. They expected and demanded a high degree of personal skill in the production and perception of speech sounds as a prerequisite for being a serious phonetician.

Structuralism was never very strongly present, partly because the general intellectual and ideological basis of American behaviourism didn't appeal. Obviously one read and knew Bloomfield, but he was essentially a Neo-Grammarian; his conversion to behaviourist psychology was very late and very superficial. What was most valuable in his work was what he got from Leipzig and developed further.

The application of linguistic knowledge – speech therapy, teaching, television

You spoke earlier of your sense of service, of ‘giving something back’. How does that square with your decision to enter the academic world and, specifically, to specialise in phonetics?

At that time I got used to the notion that if you had any knowledge in this field, part of your job was to use it for the benefit of people who had problems in that area. That was an ancient phonetic tradition, and a great deal of the teaching work of the Department of Phonetics was for speech therapists and teachers of speech and drama. The work in instrumental phonetics was quite well tied in by Fry and (Peter) Denes with the developing work on telephony – as you know, the telephone itself came out of work in phonetics. So when I was asked by Dennis Fry to take on the development of linguistics within the department, in addition to my other work, it seemed quite clear that since the general understanding of the workings of language was so abysmally low in this country – it played no part in its educational system, certainly there was nothing at school – to do something about that was part of our job. I felt – as the rest of my department at UCL felt – that part of the phonetician's responsibilities was to bring knowledge of the speech event and what was involved in it into the armoury of practitioners in the language field. Fry and Denes did a lot of work with teachers of the deaf, and more generally we were training speech therapists and teachers of English and foreign languages.

Just before I left UCL, we were invited – as a result of the bursting of My Fair Lady onto the London scene – to listen to recordings of a number of speakers brought together by the Daily Express and to fantasise about what sort of people they were, what their social background was, where they came from, what their build was, and other projections of that sort. A cartoonist drew a picture of them on a screen which was then slid back and there was the individual we had talked about. That then became an ATV panel game and I got into the television world. It so happened that at that time the BBC were introducing adult educational programmes into mainstream television and including foreign languages, starting with Italian. The senior producer, Peter Montagnon, came to Cambridge to talk to the Department of Italian, and the head of department said: ‘You ought to go and talk to Trim, he's interested in television and that sort of thing’. So I then had the opportunity to have a long discussion with Montagnon and formulate the method they would use.

I was particularly keen to use television as a way of introducing the reality of language use directly into the home. It was a principle we established that in the video component of a multi-media package there was no English; that what people were receiving was all in the foreign language. The teaching weight was not so much on the television component, which was more concerned with presenting the language reality, but on the radio programmes and the books. I'd been editing a series of compact grammar guides for different languages, so I did the grammatical breakdown and progressioning for the courses in the accompanying books. And because of that interest I was for a time made a member of the National Council for Educational Technology – I was regarded as being technologically minded, which I hardly am really. I remained a member of the Council until Margaret Thatcher became Education Secretary and wrote me a very nice polite letter thanking me for my services. That was a fair strand in the development of my applied linguistic interest. I suppose since those books had a print run of about half a million, I was teaching a lot more people German than many others.

The move to Cambridge

Could you say something about your move to Cambridge and the time you spent there?

In 1958 Sidney Allen, who was professor of Comparative Philology in Cambridge, said in his inaugural address that his first priority was to see the linguistic sciences introduced into the university. He managed to start by persuading a number of faculties that a low priority they all had in phonetics amounted to one high priority, so a lectureship in phonetics was set up and I was appointed to it. From 1958 to 1965 I taught phonetics in its various branches, but I was doing so as one subsidiary part of one Part II paper. Phonetics was part of a paper in general linguistics, which fortunately attracted quite a number of high-quality people who were prepared to do a disproportionate amount of work for one paper. Quite a number of them finished up in chairs in different places.

In 1965 the university decided that it would set up a language laboratory and a Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre. Then it thought it would bring these various interests together and set up a Department of Linguistics. At that time linguistics didn't have its own Tripos; that eventually came about, but quite recently. It was expected that Sidney Allen would take the headship, but literary interests didn't want the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre dominated by linguists so took it out of the planned department and made it an independent entity. Allen was so cross that he declined to take on the headship of department, which then fell to me. I switched my title from phonetics to linguistics and remained head of department, later Director, until I left the university in 1978. The interests they were trying to bring together at Cambridge were applied interests, and I myself became interested in a kind of troika: I wanted strong theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics in the sense of the application of linguistic understanding, knowledge and skills to the world of action, and phonetics.

CILT (Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research)

What motivated you to move from Cambridge to CILT?

By the mid-seventies I had become rather more concerned with questions of language teaching. As a result of my organising the Second Congress of Applied Linguistics in Cambridge in 1969, sponsored by the Council of Europe, I became involved in its Ten-year Major Project in support of the modernisation of language teaching in Europe and was chairing its working party on a European unit-credit system for adult language learning, which had produced The Threshold Level and was making a significant impact across the continent.

I was aware that language teaching in this country was losing ground and thought I might devote the last years of my professional life to attempting to help improve the situation. I had just been made a Governor of CILT and so when George Perren, its founding Director, suggested I might apply to succeed him, I thought it over and decided that it would be in accordance with the way my interests were developing to do so. From my contacts with young people, I felt that the reputation we had to overcome was that of being a difficult, boring and irrelevant subject in the school curriculum. Once appointed, I therefore gave strong logistic support to the teacher-based Graded Objectives movement and the national and regional Festivals of Languages. I was fortunate that my brother-in-law was chief executive of NatWest: I got NatWest to put money into the Festival of Languages, which was very successful. Both initiatives were, I think, highly successful at the time. I also strongly supported the coming together of the fragmented individual language associations into a single body, the Association for Language Learning (ALL), which would speak for the profession as a whole with a more powerful voice, as well as providing a common framework to encourage teachers, most of whom were competent in at least two foreign languages, to diversify the languages on offer in schools.

The Graded Objectives movement

What do you think was the influence of communicative approaches to language teaching in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s?

When I took up the directorship of CILT I provided secretarial support for GOML (Graded Objectives in Modern Languages), which had been started by Ann Harding and Brian Page at York, with support from Eric Hawkins. We tried not to intervene in their ideas but simply to provide secretarial facilities. Part of my enthusiasm for GOML was that it was bottom-up: teachers thinking about their own problems and finding their own solutions, becoming very motivated because it wasn't something that was imposed from on high but came out of their own interaction and mutual teacher training. I think it worked very well until it was taken over by the government when it introduced the National Curriculum. But for most of my working life the government didn't intervene in curricular matters, so there was more scope for limited bottom-up initiative and experimentation.

Because of the way the Graded Objectives movement developed, communication was interpreted in a very transactional way. As far as one could tell while it was developing, that went down very well with the pupils in the classroom and seemed to be appropriate to the conditions of language teaching for all in the UK context. I welcomed the fact that they were largely basing themselves on Council of Europe ideas, but what I appreciated particularly was that decisions were being made as close to the point of learning as possible, and that those decisions were being made not on ideological grounds but on grounds of what, in people's experience, was working.

In the later days of GOML, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of the groups were moving away from that relentlessly transactional emphasis. There was some very interesting work devoted to finding a GOML way of developing more creative approaches.

That's the way one would hope it would develop. But when the earlier products got taken over into the National Curriculum, that had rather too strong a transactional form and put off a lot of brighter people. And it was no longer felt by teachers to be their own creation; it was something that came down from above.

Modern languages curricula and exams in the UK

You said that when you first came to CILT, language learning was perceived as difficult, boring, not engaging and lacking in content. Presumably the content was driven by the old O Level, so there was a strongly grammatical syllabus, inasmuch as there was a syllabus?

For most of my career curricular matters were left to the examining bodies. They were usually controlled by universities and they were concerned with university entry. What happened to people who weren't going to be candidates for university entry was of lesser interest. When I came into this business to start with, I wrote about the gradus ad Parnassum thing: an indefinite hurdles race, where the hurdles were designed so that most people would fall over. When eventually a few devoted souls got to the end, they were strongly attached to the system because it had worked very well for them.

The syllabuses for schools were not very much more transparent than mine at University College when I did my German degree: ‘German language and literature from its beginnings to the present day’ – with a footnote to the effect that questions in examination papers might legitimately reflect the interests of the staff. Although they said ‘up to the present day’, Frederick Norman lectured on the ‘wave effect’, according to which German literature reached a peak in the thirteenth century, then declined, reached another peak at the end of the eighteenth century, and then declined again until it reached the depths of the 1930s and 1940s. The same idea was applied to Russian too. The people in charge of teaching were often refugees looking back to the past and totally rejecting the present – with good reason in the case of German, and Russian too to some extent. There was no great interest in contemporary language or contemporary developments, both of which were held to be entirely negative.

In schools, teachers were always guessing what the examiners were going to be interested in, and the only way to find out was to be an examiner oneself or to have a friend who was an examiner. There was some kind of secret order, and you had to be an insider or you didn't have much chance. I remember seeing one of the examiners’ reports for one of the examinations, by the Southern Board I think. It was a transcript of an oral examination and it said: ‘At this point the candidate clearly misses the opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge of the conditional’.

When you were director of CILT, comprehensive schools were being introduced and language teaching/ learning was expanding. Something had to be done to change things. How did you see this happening?

For good or bad, the methods that had prevailed until then were not acceptable to a large proportion of the school population. I think everybody was acutely aware of the problem. I was looking to GOML and the spread of its work. I felt one had got to be listening to teachers, but at CILT we had very limited resources. We published a fair amount, but it had rather limited circulation. The staff travelled a great deal and tried to bring back information and get ideas circulating to some extent, and we had a certain number of conferences. We were still publishing the research register, but it was quite under-used and there was an awful lot of dead wood – people still putting in entries although they'd stopped doing any work. During the whole period that I was at CILT, for some personal reasons, we didn't really have the ear of the ministry. So it's difficult to gauge how extensive our influence was. I think we did have a fair amount of influence, certainly on the language associations and the movement to get them to come together; also through Alan Moys's very close association with the language advisers. But we never had really close relations with the teacher trainers. They didn't even form a world of their own; they were very isolated and had no national organisation. I felt that on the whole the teacher training departments were not really very advanced in their thinking. For languages, teacher training had to be university-based: the students were graduates. I suppose I was tackling the teacher training issue at European level but not so much at national level.

Do you think that there is a problem of getting teachers to change what they do because they're worried that in five years’ time there will be another wave of change?

I wouldn't put it quite like that. I think teachers are basically conservative because they've got their routines going and it's easier to continue than to change them for something that may or may not be better. But I think their resistance to change will be strengthened by one or two other factors. One is that they are themselves the successful products of whatever systems were in use when they were learning, so they can't really believe from their own experience that the status quo is bad. Secondly, if they are inspired by new ideas in their initial training they are likely to come up against conservative influences in the staffroom telling them that this is all fancy stuff but it won't work, what you want to do is get their noses down to the grindstone. We found with teacher training workshops that people were often very discouraged when they went back with new ideas and found that they got a very cold reception. They also had to cope with people who are stuck with what were new ideas some time ago and are now thought to be yesterday's ideas.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is worried by the current backlash against the communicative approach. Communication is now being talked about as a failed methodology, and the answer is to go back to the failed methodology it replaced.

Earlier approaches to language teaching

In the mid to late 1990s the Qualification and Curriculum Authority organised a conference about grammar for teachers of English and modern languages. A number of people who should have known better were saying things like: ‘Of course, with the communicative approach you don't do any grammar’. Do you agree that that has been the interpretation of many people: that the communicative approach is just about talking?

Yes, ‘phrase-book level’ – which it isn't.

Do you have any theory as to why that response is so common? Is it just that people are lazy in their thinking?

For anybody with any linguistic background at all it should be clear what we mean when we talk about grammar: the principles according to which sentences are constructed. But it's often taken to mean ‘getting things right’ on a very surface level. I've written about this from time to time. It's interesting still to read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians on Arnold and modern languages. Arnold was quite progressive in that he actually introduced foreign languages at Rugby, but he said: ‘It is evident that it should be taught according to the well-established principles of the teaching of the classical languages’. And in the case of classics the teaching of the language is a necessary and rather unfortunate prolegomenon to reading the literature. What else is there? Literature is the reality and you've got to learn to be able to read it with understanding. That was the approach to modern languages for a long time. The modern languages now had a classical literature that was worthy of attention, and the main thing was to know the language well enough to be able to read serious works of literature with understanding; and after all, people didn't travel all that much.

Learner autonomy

Back in 1990 CILT organised a weekend conference on learner autonomy, and then there was a follow-up workshop in Cardiff which lasted for nearly a week and produced the book that Brian Page edited, Letting go, taking hold. Things started to happen, but then fizzled out, perhaps because there wasn't a sufficiently strong bottom-up dynamic.

It hasn't completely gone, has it? There's a lot going on in Finland, or at least there was when I last knew about it, and to some extent in Sweden. It's very much a Scandinavian idea somehow. Of course, Holec was a very strong advocate of autonomy. Edith Esch in Cambridge came from Nancy and one of the first things she did when she joined the department was to organise a seminar on autonomy, which I opened with an adapted quotation from Shakespeare: ‘Some are born to autonomy, some achieve autonomy, and some have autonomy thrust upon them’. At that time the language laboratory in Cambridge had a staff of one, so with 40 languages in stock people just had to get on with it. There was no alternative to autonomy, and they did very well, partly because the whole educational training of Cambridge graduates has been to steadily increase their autonomy through the course of their educational experience. One has always thought that autonomy is very important but it has to be very carefully prepared. You can't expect it to work simply by telling people that they've got to get on with it themselves. But one of the objectives that any teacher should have must be eventually to make his pupils able to work independently of him or her. I think that is done rather more in public schools than in state schools.

Grammar schools, comprehensive schools and streaming

Can we go back to your grammar school education? In one of his essays, the historian Tony Judt acknowledged the benefits that going to grammar school bestowed on him, but he went on to say that as a socialist he'd always felt ambivalent about this and had never managed completely to resolve it in his mind. Part of him felt that comprehensivisation was politically and socially appropriate, but he could see that it undermined the system that had given him so much.

Well, they're difficult issues. I was very conscious of the fact that streaming in my primary school went no way to advancing social equality because it was quite clear what kind of children were in the top stream and what kind of background produced children who were in the bottom stream, with the middle stream having some of each. I think all the children from the local orphanage were in the bottom stream. They wore boots, whereas we wore shoes. There were differences of dress, differences of behaviour and quite obviously differences of perspective, expectations and likely careers. This was all within something that would look from the outside as though it were ‘comprehensive’.

My experience later as an examiner for oral French and German for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, looking at the effect of comprehensive schools in Harlow, Essex, convinced me that the system was not producing greater social harmonisation. For one thing, the schools themselves in Harlow were draining different constituencies and already people were moving in order to be in the right place for the right school. Examining the pupils from what had established itself as the traditional prestige school in a new town, I found that almost all of the children had been to France or Germany or both during the Easter vacation to prepare for the oral examination. They were all intending to go on to the sixth form and then to university. They had a range of cultural and sporting interests that they were able to converse about very fluently. I could pass them all with high grades.

Then, going to another school which was also comprehensive, I found that their interests were in pop music and dancing; that they were leaving school as soon as possible, hoping to get jobs in London, or at any rate a job of some sort; that they had never had holidays abroad; and that ‘abroad’ was not really in their horizon. They had been taught by a succession of teachers, and modern languages had no reality for them. They had learnt to describe ‘mein Haus’ in German, but if you deviated in any way from the text they had learnt, they couldn't cope. If you showed them a postcard with a lot of activities on it and asked them what was happening, they couldn't say anything. Objectively you couldn't pass any of them. In both schools there were one or two who were out of their place and unhappy in one environment when they would have been better off in the other. So some form of selection was operating, but it was much more dependent on social background than under the former system.

Language education policy

You've probably seen more policies than most, both in the UK and in Europe. Have you got any thoughts about why we keep on having policies and strategies? And which ones do you think have been more or less successful – or are we going round in circles?

I think the difficulty with policy on languages in this country is the absence of any really clear analysis of the problem. We need to understand a great deal more about the role of different languages in the life of the country and of individuals; and we need then to be able to set objectives which meet the needs of individuals and society, reconciling the differences of objective between the two, being appropriate to the characteristics of learners, and being feasible in light of the resources that can be mobilised in the educational process. Real intellectual clarity has not been achieved and there is a great deal of resistance one way and another to clarity of analysis, because there are many different interests involved.

We talked earlier about the role of English in the world and the impact that has on citizens’ needs for international communication. Do you think that's an area that needs to be explored more?

There are two things, of course, which are not identical: the actual role of English in human affairs and the image in people's minds of the role of English. There is a widespread feeling that language learning is irrelevant: why should we bother to learn a foreign language when speakers of that language already know English better than we can ever know their language? Is this true or not? I suppose the answer is that only a minority of the population around the world have any effective command of English for communication, but most of those with whom casual visitors are likely to come into contact will have. There are very few non-native English-speaking communities which will have English playing a large part in their internal life. Now, how relevant is that internal life to young English learners – or older English learners? That depends. If you go on package holidays you will expect to be treated in your native language, particularly if it's English. If your idea of going on holiday is getting off the beaten track, getting to see the country and to know the people, then you will increasingly come into contact with people whose only form of communication is their own native language, although they may be able to make some efforts with the English they have learnt at school. Across Europe, of course, the standard of English language teaching has risen enormously over the last generation, particularly in northern Europe but increasingly in southern Europe too.

What perspective do we then give to younger people? Do we get them interested in other peoples for their own sake? Or do we think of them simply in transactional terms? I think the tendency of the communicative movement to go in a transactional direction may be OK as a starting point for getting learners’ immediate short-term interest. But what I think is important to teenagers and adults is human contact – to be able to express one's own emotions but also to share them with other people and find out about other people as people. Life for a teenager opens up intellectually and emotionally and is a period when there are problems of adjustment, and those problems dominate people's minds. But on the whole they can talk about them in their English lessons – but they can't talk about them in the foreign language lessons because they haven't got the equipment to do so.

Is that what you mean when you say that we do not have a clear enough analysis on which to base policy? In your schooldays, for example, learning languages was something that an educated person did, but there would be relatively few of them and they would be potentially part of a European or world elite. Also, language learning was about literature. But in recent times we have been vacillating between an instrumental justification for language learning and the kind of humanistic arguments that you are advancing, which are quite difficult to put into a policy framework or rationale.

In my day you learnt the code and what use you made of it was up to you: I think language learning was seen in those terms. One had texts that were devised to exemplify grammatical forms and lexical content. You might find the actual texts themselves interesting or not, but they presented the forms of the language in an attempt at a logical order and they gave you exercises to build up your knowledge. Use of the language was confined to that, I think. Some people were good at it and some people weren't. Those people who were very good at it tended to end up teaching it. Probably a major problem is that we can envisage what we would like to set as objectives for language learning, but we are not prepared to devote the resources, particularly time, which would achieve those objectives.

Matching policy to resources, balancing means and ends

I think policy has to be realistic and the objectives you set have to be commensurate with the resources that you will devote to their achievement, otherwise you get into a position where the objectives are too ambitious for the available resources. It's very difficult to stop people learning if they really want to learn, so however bad the method is and however limited the resources, if people really want to learn they will do so. But you can expect that intense drive in only a small minority of cases. If you're planning for the mass of the population, then you've got to have a balance between objectives and resources. It's no good having objectives which are very worthwhile but which are not appropriate to the characteristics of the learners or feasible in the light of the resources you've got. And the resources that we're currently prepared to give to languages in the education system are totally inadequate. What can you expect from an hour a week? We had an hour a day throughout secondary school.

Traditionally, we expect foreign language learners in our school systems to achieve a level of proficiency that is quite out of proportion to the investment of time. One finds in A Level or the Irish Leaving Certificate or German Abitur the requirement to produce extended text in the target language for which the investment of time is completely inadequate.

What steps do you take, policy-wise, to have a proper balance between means and ends? Do you set down objectives which you think are worthwhile and then consider how you mobilise the resources to achieve them? Or do you say: these are the resources that are available. What are the objectives that one can set that are attainable on a viable scale, given those resources? How do you manage this economy? Because obviously, if you increase the amount of time which is given to languages at school – because that amount of time is necessary if you are to achieve the objectives that you have set yourself – that time has got to come at the expense of something else, and there is competition among the different subjects for time.

A central dilemma for policy

Don't you think that's where your earlier comment about the need for careful study comes in? If we are limited to available resources, we'll do nothing, because available resources are not enough. Even when we had our National Languages Strategy there were significantly more resources than now. But what do we want as a society? Do we want primary school children who are approaching A1 in oral skills and have some skills in writing? Do we want CLIL? Because if we do, there are inescapable resource implications.

I think we have been very reluctant to face the dilemma. Whatever we do with the language is drawing on a central linguistic resource, but bringing that into action is very different according to the different modalities. Recall skills are more demanding than recognition skills – that's an ancient psychological finding; and in many people the visual sense is stronger than the auditory, so if there's a given amount of time and effort, you're likely to be able to get further with reading skills than with speaking skills. If you abandon the idea of setting a particular level as an objective in all four modalities and in conversational interaction, which is a further complication because there's more to it than just a combination of listening and speaking – it's demanding in a number of ways, tied up with theory of mind and so on. Perhaps you should concentrate on profiles in which different skills may be at different levels. My reading skills in Spanish are probably about B1, but my speaking skills are below A1, and I can repeat that for a number of languages: I can read a text with a little help, time and reference documents, but this won't apply to holding a conversation with a Spaniard. So what kind of profiles should we be trying to set up as an objective for pupils? At the moment we try to set up a flat profile in accordance with the definition of level, but in reality the profile is necessarily jagged, but that is not usually explicitly formulated. For example, in oral skills what is the relation between understanding and speaking?

If you're actually working in the field you don't directly control central policy. You have to adapt what you do to externally imposed necessities, and you probably don't have any choice in the amount of time you have available – perhaps not even in the materials you use. As a practitioner you have to make the best job you can in the conditions which are imposed upon you. People who are involved in policy – if they are intelligent policy makers – will be concerned particularly with this question of the setting of objectives in relation to their feasibility, desirability, appropriacy. These are the keys to successful policy making.

Bearing in mind our earlier discussion, would you say also ‘realistic’? You could set an objective for all school leavers to achieve B2 in their first foreign language, even though very few meet that requirement.

One form of corruption is to set and publish very demanding objectives and then in the actual assessment and certification to allow something to be successful which is very much below that, so that high-sounding objectives are rhetorical and a long way from the reality. And if you get to accept that, then really rational planning goes out of the window.

A possible new approach to language teaching in the UK

When you look at the situation in much of the anglophone world, language teaching – especially at university level – is still seen as a rather lowly activity in the service of the real stuff, which is philological and literary study. But the challenge of what we should be doing in the multilingual classroom – what it might look like and how we might respond to the range of languages present there – seems to be so important.

Yes indeed. I think one important thing is attack: somehow you've got to capture people for wanting to find out and not being simply passive recipients. I would be fairly sympathetic to the idea in this country, with the situation of English in the world, if teaching were concentrated on enabling people to make sense of texts in a number of other languages rather than trying to get equal skills development in one or two languages. When people have a limited knowledge of another language and set out to use it, they are quite likely to find that the people they are talking to are better in English. And it's very demotivating when that happens. On the other hand, you don't want to cut yourself off from understanding what people are saying all around you or to deprive yourself of sources of information in languages other than English if you require it for your own work. You can use all kinds of heuristic techniques and knowledge of your own and other languages in order to make sense of a text. In our workshops for teacher trainers we often used the activity of giving participants a text in a language of which they didn't have any previous knowledge and getting them to find out what it means; and a group of experienced linguists can decipher a text in a language they don't know in a couple of hours and construct something of its grammar along the way. Kenneth Pike used to do this on the stage with his Summer Institute of Linguistics people, talking about Bible translation. He would get somebody up from the audience with a language that he didn't know and within fifteen minutes he could give a fair account of its grammar, phonology, morphology and a certain amount of vocabulary using elicitation techniques. My granddaughter visited me when a friend had sent me a joke in Italian by e-mail and I said: ‘Come and look at this, it's really funny’. And she said: ‘Oh, I don't know Italian’. So I said: ‘Come and look at it. You've done French and Latin and you say you can't cope with Italian?’ And of course, as soon as she read it, she understood it, more or less, without great difficulty – and even politely laughed. If one concentrated on understanding – and for literate people it's easier with written than spoken texts – you might get quite a long way. But equal skills development means that you're investing a great deal in what may be the more difficult and perhaps less appropriate skills. So I would keep an open mind on experimentation of that sort.

An early start in language learning

You've already mentioned insufficient time allocation as a problem. What about an early start? Apart from any other advantage that's obviously a way of getting more time.

Generally speaking great hopes have been raised with regard to the early start, but it seems to me that people have simply shelved the findings of the 1960s – the Burstall report and HMSI Hoy's ‘conditions for success’.Footnote ¹ As far as I can see, from the point of view of recent policy, the support that was given to the early start was half-hearted. The earlier policy started with the Leeds experiment, and there you had an enthusiast using a highly oral method, getting the pupils talking and producing very substantial results very quickly, but then finding that things disintegrated once the written language was introduced. The class had gone along fairly homogeneously while they were in the oral mode and then diverged very quickly once the written form was there, which in some cases accelerated learning and in other cases caused it to collapse. You remember Claire Burstall's results, saying that older learners were better than younger learners and that by 16 you could no longer tell the difference between those who had started at eight and those who had started at 11.

Although a number of people questioned those results. . .

I don't think the results were questionable but the interpretation of them. I don't think people looked sufficiently carefully at the conditions of classroom learning and teacher preparation.

I'm interested in Bernadette Holmes's experimentFootnote ² because, as I understand it, her objective is to get pupils from a very early stage used to having the foreign language as the natural form of communication in the classroom in the hours that are devoted to learning it, limited though they are. When the teacher comes in, the classroom is transformed into a world that is monolingual but in the foreign language. That means paying special attention to the language of classroom control and classroom interaction rather than anything that is outside the classroom, at least to start with. I think that is interesting; there's a lot to be said for it.

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)

A recent report from another anglophone country, Australia, suggests that the most effective way of turning monolinguals into bi- or multilinguals is via some kind of bilingual CLIL approach. CLIL experiments touch on a lot of the Council of Europe work. What is your view?

In principle I find CLIL very attractive, though there are well-known problems – again, teacher preparation and the question of whether it is high- or low-stakes. Learner preparation is also important. One would hope that if you have managed to establish that you are prepared to struggle to communicate the ideas which you have in the foreign language rather than limit the cognitive, emotional and intellectual demands to what you have already established the mechanisms for, then you may overcome what the Germans call die ewige Harmlosigkeit des Fremdsprachenunterichts (‘the eternal harmlessness of foreign language teaching’) – the fact that foreign language teaching doesn't touch upon the issues which are really fundamental to the developing teenage mind. If CLIL is well done, then it should produce a content that the pupils really want to get, and that makes an enormous difference. If they don't understand, this is a problem that they must overcome. CLIL should be challenging, but a challenge that can be met. That requires considerable skill on the part of the teachers in the light of the degree of preparation that the pupils have. Introducing the foreign language as the mode of communication within the classroom is very difficult if it's left too late. Hence the tradition that university lectures in modern languages are given in the mother tongue – it's felt that if they are given in the foreign language the students won't understand, leaving aside the competence of the teachers themselves to lecture at an appropriate level in the foreign language. So I think CLIL is a wonderful idea, but it requires very careful planning and preparation, and it needs to be introduced when the pupils have been brought up to expect it and to be able to cope with it. If you introduce it suddenly, without first developing the necessary comprehension skills, it's likely to be more than people can cope with – unless it's reduced to something that is harmlos, innocuous.

Finally, John, if by some magic our ministers were to turn round and say, ‘OK, we've heard that you know all about languages, tell us what to do’, what would you tell them?

Go away and hire some people to think about this really hard.