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My first teaching post was at a college of advanced technology. My timetable at that time included Italian for musicians; non vocational Italian evening classes; French for secretaries and caterers; German for businessmen and scientists [In those days the single business woman in the class was quite happy to be included as a businessman]; Russian for anyone interested and English for foreigners at different levels for students attending the college.

There were course books available for some subjects but it quickly became apparent that I would have to devise my own teaching materials to make the courses more relevant to my students. It was quite a challenge but I was lucky to be in one of the first colleges to have a language lab and the department I had joined was at the forefront of introducing the latest methodolgy and exploring different language learning techniques. I had been doing this for three years when I became pregnant, and in those days maternity ‘leave’ really meant leaving. I was asked when the baby was due and an advert went in the paper for my replacement…

With more mouths to feed I soon found myself teaching evening classes and doing translation and interpreting work for local companies. A shortage of supply teachers in the local primary schools also meant that I was soon asked if I could help out. It was not as dramatic as the request my mother received after the war when the mother superior of the local convent went down on her knees in our sitting room and begged her to help them, a request which my mother found impossible to refuse, but I soon found myself with a regular part time job teaching in a local primary school 2 days a week. I was thoroughly enjoying this as it was a small country school and we still had the freedom in those days to decide what we would do. A really warm sunny afternoon could see the whole school, all 19 of them, playing rounders or going for a nature walk, and there was the day when I arrived at school to find the cook wielding a large egg whisk and declaring, ‘Just wait till the teachers come’ … unfortunately both the headmaster and the infant teacher had flu and ‘the teachers’ proved to be me, but with the help of cook and a mother who listened to the younger pupils read we had a delightful, if slightly unusual, week.

Apparently the powers that be were annoyed at having to pay me graduate rates to teach in a primary school and I was asked to swap with a primary qualified teacher who was working in the secondary school. I think I must attribute a lot of my later success in teaching to the good grounding I had in primary where I had to think more about how to get the information across and I think it was then that I realised it was more important to create a learning situation, where the pupils of whatever age, actually wanted to learn than to ‘teach’.

In the secondary school which just going through the throes of being made a comprehensive, I was in charge of a first year class. The innovative approach of the maverick headmaster meant that the pupils coming in to secondary school were still taught most subjects by the class teacher, which meant that the experience of ‘moving up’ for the pupil was less traumatic than is normally the case. There was a team of 8 teachers and we worked together. I had to teach my class English, maths, environmental studies [local history] , environmental science and I taught most of the classes French. I was thoroughly enjoying this when the headmaster, who had been watching Auf Wiedersehen Pet on television, the programme about the builders, mostly from the North of England who go out looking for work in Germany, and decided that as quite a lot of our ex-pupils were likely to go into the building trade they should all learn German….

A colleague and I were told to teach all year 8 German. We were given two periods a week with each class and a set of GCE grammar based books…. It was obvious that this was not going to work and my colleague soon got another job, so that left me with the task of reconciling the headmaster’s very laudable plans with the reality of politically correct really mixed ability classes and no suitable teaching materials, so I wrote my own.
With the help of our excellent reprographics department I made booklets to cover the different stages of the course and got my school pupil daughter to illustrate them. At that time CSE was becoming popular as an easy version of the GCE and local schools were beginning to put pupils in for the exam. It was still too difficult for most pupils so local areas devised their own exams, which became known as Graded Level tests or Graded Objectives, so that pupils could ‘pass’ a test every year and feel they were getting somewhere.

Because of the mass comprehensivisation and mixed ability teaching a lot of schools subjects which had previously been the domain of grammar school pupils were either watered down so that everyone could do them or, as in the case of Latin, quietly dropped. It was felt that all pupils had the right to learn a foreign language. In the past languages had been taught, often not very successfully, using a grammatical framework. As pupils were no longer taught grammar this now became impossible and we had to devise new ways of teaching without reference to terrible words like nouns, verbs or adjectives.

When I asked the head of English if they could not just teach a little grammar he replied, ‘If you need grammar you teach it, they don’t need it for English, they speak it already!’
Happily this has changed but there must be a whole generation of teachers who were brought up under this regime and whose grasp of grammar is to say the least, not very sound.

Whilst we were all struggling to teach a language to these mixed ability classes it became apparent that new ways of teaching would have to be introduced. When I started in further education I had been lucky to work in an innovative team using the very latest methods. Schools did not yet have the resources to do the same but we were using the tape recorder and slides. The listening material was properly recorded even if somewhat stilted.

I was once accosted on a bus by an ex-pupil who had obviously had too much to drink who said, ‘Look it’s my f……. German teacher, ‘Lieselotte ist nicht meine Ssschwester Mein Hund heisst Lumpi’.’ Which at least showed he had remembered something from the first lesson of the Nuffield tapes. In fact he had gone on to pass his GCSE, so presumably it had made some impression on him!

Since we had had to ditch any reference to grammar we had to put more emphasis on rote learning phrases which should rightly involve saying them. If language was now to be communicative then pupils would be speaking in class. When I was a pupil at school the only speaking we did was to read out a sentence when it was our turn. This was not a good method for learning to speak a language and I had to think of a way of getting my pupils to speak more in class – easy enough if I let them speak English but quite another matter to get them to speak in German. One day I borrowed stopwatches from the PE department and gave every pupil one and asked them to time how much they actually spoke German in class. To my horror the longest was 13 seconds.

I realised that I would have to get them working together so I started to write short dialogues so that pupils would have a model for speaking and could work in pairs.
The other teachers said it would be impossible to have everyone speaking at the same time but it wasn’t. Once the pupils understood what it was they were doing they did it well and mostly seemed to enjoy it. It was so successful that it even made the local news and was picked up by local radio who carried out an interview and called it: ‘Last of the Liebfraumilch’ as the local school was in Holmfirth, home of the programme ‘Last of the Summer wine.’

An old college friend, with whom I had lost touch, rang me up from London to say she had just heard me and my pupils on, ‘You and yours’ at lunch time whilst driving in her car to pick up props for a school play.

As a result of this other local schools asked if they could have copies of my home made teaching materials which made me want to improve them and add real recordings, something I could not do without a publisher. I saw and advert for a 3 months scholarship in Language materials development at York University and decided to apply for it. I did not get the scholarship but instead was invited to go for a year on a diploma course. My headmaster agreed and I had a whole glorious year to study language acquisition and applied linguistics. I spent a considerable time in school in Germany listening to what the pupils actually said so that I could make the language more relevant to the age group of the learner. I had not been surprised on a school exchange that I used to run when I asked a girl if she was speaking German in the house where she was staying and she said: They don’t speak it like what you teach us,’ as I knew she was quite right and I hoped to be able to do something about it.

At the end of my ‘year out’ I had completed my first real book. It was the last time I had to use a typewriter and it was when cut and paste meant using scissors and glue. After that my husband made me get a computer which had to be booted up with a disk every time I used it and everything had to be saved to disk on completion. My children can remember me lying on the floor beating it with my fists when I realised I had not saved a book properly and I had lost it… four hours later and a very large phone bill we managed to retrieve some of it but there was a lot of other material that got lost permanently and a lot of late hours spent re-writing material that I had lost.

My first book was published by Heinemann and I have to thank Bob Osborne and Kay Symons for believing in me and giving me my first chance. In those days you sat round the table with the designer and editor and discussed the pages, layout and illustrations together. Then they said they would make the recordings in England and get adults to raise their voices to pretend to be children because that is what they usually did. This is when I saw red….

There was no point in my doing all this work to provide the pupils with realistic language models if they were then going to be spoken by adults. Most publishers had no experience of recording with children’s voices abroad and it certainly was not being done for school books but I was adamant so I set about finding suitable voices in our twin school and a recording studio, and Deutsch Jetzt was born. Everyone liked the quality and the naturalness of the recordings even if it had meant staying up till three in the morning editing the tapes. In the early days it was recorded on tape and the bits cut up and spliced together so every time someone made a mistake or coughed or shuffled, the tape had to be cut and pasted together afterwards by hand.

I was still teaching full time and apart from my head of department refusing to look at or even touch one of my books, I had been warned about professional jealousy, everyone else was very nice. I continued to arrange exchange trips and worked with the Goethe Institute making videos to use in schools including ‘Why Learn German?’ which I have been told was shown on Lufthansa flights to promote the German language.

My next major book was Lernexpress which was made in conjunction with Longman { now Pearson} and the BBC. The BBC made 20 videos to go with the 20 chapters of the book for which I received the handsome fee of £20 per video which did not even cover my costs but I was told that I was lucky to get anything as the BBC considered it an honour to be allowed to work with them. Lernexpress was for a very specific market which was not a large one so despite its critical success it was not a financial success for me. Actually I always thought Lernexpress 2 and its video was probably the best language learning materials that I ever wrote.

I was then asked to write a French book which is when Avantage was born. I made it 6 Modules to tie in with the six half terms. Each Unit was on a double page spread so that having found the right page pupils did not need to turn over during a lesson, I hoped to avoid the habitual delaying tactic: ’What page are we on, Miss?’ For greater clarity all the exercises were numbered down the left hand side of the page, something which all subsequent courses have copied. It might seem glaringly obvious but until then the exercises in other courses had mostly wandered about all over the pages.

I also incorporated a system of in built revision using what I had learned from studying memory techniques. Each module began with the most important new material and then the material at the end of each unit was intended for the pupils who were making most progress. It was my intention that not all pupils needed to finish the whole unit but that they should all start at the beginning of the next unit after a holiday. However some teachers insisted on covering everything in great detail as they did not understand the philosophy behind the course. As well as the pair work which was so successful in Deutsch Jetzt I also continued to refer to grammar as ‘word patterns’ and invited pupils to look for ‘word patterns’ to help them build new language of their own.

I was very upset when the curriculum meant that we had to change the way we were presenting languages and the enormous emphasis that was suddenly put on testing. Every exercise had to be able to be used for testing one of the 136 skills or levels which had to be tested each year. It became so ridiculous that there was no time left for teaching as all the time was taken up by testing. In an average class of 30 pupils to test each pupil 136 times meant 2080 ticks ( or crosses and re-test) per year per class. Most teachers know perfectly well what level their pupils are working at….

When I was doing my research into language acquisition there were two people who had a great influence on me. Firstly Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767-1835, German government official, philosopher, linguist and educationalist, who founded the famous Humboldt university in Berlin who said:

‘We cannot teach a language, we can only create the situation in which it can be learned.’

and then there was Kung fu tzu better known as Confucius, slightly earlier,( 551-479 BC) who said:

Hear and forget
See and remember
Do and understand …

I have always tried to create situations in which language can be learned, and included task based learning so that the learner ‘does’ something with the language he or she is learning; but sometimes the pressures put on the publishers by the powers that be that decide on the curriculum has made it very difficult and sometimes impossible to do, but I always keep these two phrases in mind when I am writing.

My next major book was Auf Deutsch which replaced Deutsch Jetzt and fell into the pattern devised for Avantage. Again the recordings were made in Germany by children and the book was very successful. One of the signs of its success was the fact that it was chosen by the French speaking part of Switzerland as the official course for pupils learning German. To my knowledge it was also translated into Dutch but I don’t know how successful it was there. I remember picking up a copy of the book with Auf Deutsch on the front cover and finding that my name was not included amongst the list of Dutch authors. I believe it might have been included in small type somewhere inside.

I had the same feeling when I saw copies of my adult German book TY Beginner’s German when I found copies in Polish and Mandarin. I have also written or series edited other books for TY including vocabulary books and the book and interactive CD Grammar Made Easy for the parent company Hodder. These again were critical successes but also sold under the McGraw Hill imprint cheap on Amazon [ they changed the front cover] so they did not bring in much revenue.

Because of the changes in the curriculum Avantage was eventually replaced by Metro which I did not consider as exciting a book but which fulfilled the rquirements of helping pupils to pass the requisite exams and so was well received by the teachers. At this stage I had been asking for an interactive Cd to accompany the course and although I was not totally pleased with the finished product it was a major step forward in language teaching and learning. I felt the most important thing in language acquisition is listening and the interactive cd gave pupils individual learning and the chance to listen as many times as they needed until they were ready to move on to new material.

After Metro I co-wrote Expo 4, which replaced Metro in that it was even more exam specific. The tendency in most subjects seems to be to write the exam paper first and then teach to it so that everyone, or nearly, everyone passes. Laudable though this may be I am afraid that real language learning is taking second place to rote learning for exams. I know that there always was some aspects of rote learning especially in preparation for the oral exam, but those rote learned phrases gave the pupils support to help them build new language by adding words and phrases of their own …now they seem to either have to know the whole answer or not know it and fail. Gone are the days of extemporising.

I think that I owe some of my success to the fact that I had an all round experience of teaching, from infant to post graduate, and some to the fact that I was not a brilliant academic linguist and so can understand other people’s problems. I love being able to speak to people in their own language and I love trying to help other people do the same thing. I believe that our ability to communicate through language is vitally important and I do not like it when people use a language to exclude other people. I do not believe language should be used in this way, as a form of linguistic apartheid, but I also believe we should try to make some effort to learn other people’s languages and not expect them to speak to us in ours.

I am presently engaged on some really exciting projects some of which will be published shortly. I have also started to learn Mandarin and have recently returned from China, so you can expect developments in that area soon too! Mandarin is a completely different language and I had tried many courses and listened to lots of Cds but still found it totally impenetrable. I never got any further than the first two words: ni hao, so I decided I wanted to write a Mandarin course which worked and you could actually remember what you have learned, which is what I have done – and if you want to learn Mandarin I hope you will try it and it will work for you too.