Around 1980
I was teaching
at a language school
in Oxford,
teaching mainly intermediate students
and
they came from from all over the world,
mixed nationalities,
mixed first language backgrounds,
uh... they were also
mixed in other ways,
in their educational experience for example
and their expectations
and that includes their attitude to grammar.
So there's a problem focusing on grammar because the needs
and wishes of students are so varied
and also the fact that we have two or three weeks.
They could focus on grammar anywhere in the world as long as they have a book
or something, or some source of information
uh... but they don't get all the practice which they could get in the
classroom.
So,
it was a rather unsatisfactory
situation dealing with grammar
in the classrooms that I was teaching in
at that time
and,
it wasn't very, it
didn't make much sense, doing grammar in class for the reasons I have given.
On the other hand,
students had
grammar problems and lots of questions and queries,
confusions,
gaps in their knowledge
and
often they wanted those addressed. They would also ask if I could recommend a
grammar book that would help them
find
the answers to
the queries they had,
and at that time,
this is around 1980, I couldn't really recommend
a grammar book for students. I found them
too academic, I don't think they were really written
with the learner in mind.
So I wanted to write some material to
give to students
to answer their queries without having to do grammar with the whole class
so I wrote a series of worksheets
and each of these
dealt with a particular point of grammar, it might be the difference between
two tenses:
the Past Continuous and the Past Simple, or it might be a specific point like
"used to:" I
"used to" do something, as opposed to: I am "use to" doing something.
So each worksheet had a topic like that
and it consisted of
three parts
uh... an explanation section
which explained the grammar concerned, dealt with the problems concerned with
examples,
and uh...
exercises:
a number of easy to do exercises, uncomplicated exercises,
just for the student, the learner, to clarify
in his or her mind
the information that they just received,
and then there was another sheet of paper which had the answers and these were kept
in the school library and they worked very well.
I did about thirty of these and they were very popular with students, students liked them,
and I though, well
I
could get this published maybe.
I approached three publishers and Cambridge University Press were
really the only ones to respond positively
and we got on with it. They agreed to give me a contract and
I wrote
the book based on these worksheets.
I remember getting a phone call actually, after about a year,
from Cambridge University Press saying
that sales have suddenly
taken off and that
they were higher than expected
and the book was becoming quite popular, at least in certain countries.
So I knew it wasn't going to be unsuccessful at that stage.
And then, year-by-year, it got better and better and better
... which of course I never expected and you never know how long that's going to last,
it can maybe last
two years, five years, ten years -
it's gone on for twenty five years I think.
So I think it happened pretty quickly and I
realized it was
going to sell quite well.
There's been
three editions so far
with a fourth one
soon to be published.
It's great to have an opportunity to improve,
and correct,
and refine things a little bit, rework them, make things a bit clearer, reword
something and
I quite enjoy doing that, but it's also an opportunity to update things
from a language point of view
... there's a lot of
cultural change and lifestyle change in twenty-five years, changing things
like that is important.
Now with the fourth edition
there's going to be an online version which is
really the biggest feature of the fourth edition
so you have the opportunity to access it online as well as
in print.
I'm very interested in language, languages and language learning
I love the
history of language, historical linguistics, and
the way languages relate to one another,
I find it fascinating, I love
reading about it, talking about it
and doing it. I go to language classes
I enjoy that experience very much.