Work at ELE

I started working at IALS (now ELE) in 1980, first as Tutor and then Teaching Fellow, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. In August 2011 I was awarded a personal chair in Student Learning (English for Academic Purposes). My responsibilities as Head of the EAP Section covered three main areas: the English Language Testing and Tuition programme of in-session support for international students at the University; the summer pre-sessional programme for students preparing to enter the University; and the EAP components of the international Foundation Programmes in the College of Science and Engineering, and the College of Humanities and Social Science. My main research interests have tended to have a practical focus on the language classroom: second language listening comprehension, student-teacher interaction, alternative forms of feedback, and task-based learning. When I retired from teaching and supervision in 2014, I was appointed Emeritus Professor and am currently working on research into the benefits of task recycling in pre-sessional EAP.

My background

I was brought up in Horsham, West Sussex, in the south of England and went to the local grammar school, which uncovered some talent for languages (French, Latin and German - in chronological order) and for cricket. I went to St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1968 to study German as my main subject, with subsidiary French and Linguistics, with quite a lot of cricket on the side. I spent my two Cambridge summer vacations hitch-hiking around the entire Irish coast (1969) and working in a factory in southern Sweden and on a farm in Finland (1970). In preparation for the 1970 trip I read Teach Yourself Swedish and watched Ingemar Bergman films. Neither helped me cope with the southern Swedish accent of the factory foreman.

After graduating in 1971 I went back to Sweden to teach English for a year in Falun and then a second in Umeå, before coming back to do a Postgraduate Diploma course in English as a Second Language at the University of Leeds (1973-74), which included teaching practice in Frisia (Netherlands), where I was taught Dutch by a three-year-old. After that I worked in post-revolutionary Portugal and unrevolutionary England. I continued my northward progress through British universities by coming to Edinburgh in 1977 to do the MSc in Applied Linguistics. Since then, apart from a year in north-east Brazil, I have been based in Edinburgh, completing a PhD in 1988.

The title of my own thesis was ‘Grading foreign language listening comprehension materials: The use of naturally modified interaction' (Anthony J. Lynch, 1988, University of Edinburgh). You can read the Abstract here: