The Linguist

30 The Linguist Vol/62 No/1 thelinguist.uberflip.com INSTITUTE MATTERS My year abroad was in Gabon – my first time in West Africa. I'd say I came back a different person. I stayed with a nice family and had a teaching job in a local school. It was a fascinating society, very multilingual and a completely different physical environment, like nothing I had experienced before. There was no internet; I phoned home once a week and letters took six weeks to arrive! You got your degree, broadened your horizons… Then what, Philip? I temped for about six months. I didn't want to do a Master's straightaway; I wanted to earn some money. The first full-time job I got was at CILT (the UK's national Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research) in London. They recruited linguists but my job was quite practical. I started as the receptionist, then moved on to conference organising. CILT was the UK reference for languages, all the way from primary to university and research; whatever it was, they had someone to support that sector. It was led by Dr Lid King with whom I have continued working to this day. Can you tell us a bit about one of the projects you worked on at CILT? The project I'm most proud to have been part of was as Project Manager for the National Primary Programme – a multi-year, multimillion pound cascading training programme to upskill the whole primary school workforce in England to teach languages at Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11). That's 18,000 schools! We had a national team of advisors going out and So question number one, tell us a bit about your background, Philip, and how you came to be a linguist… I was pretty much born into it as I grew up in a bilingual family. My mum is French, my dad English and Irish, but he was really into languages. So we spoke French a lot at home, and my mum is an applied linguist. I did German at school and really enjoyed that, and some Russian when I was a teenager. Where I grew up in rural Cambridge was very monocultural. I felt so lucky to have this other world in France that I could run off to in the holidays. And that led you to study French and linguistics at the University of Oxford… Yes. I wasn't sure whether to apply for German and French; in the end, the degree I really wanted to do was mainly French literature. It was a privilege. To have that time where, basically, your job is to read. Did you have any particular authors that you liked? I quite like the older medieval texts because the conventions are so different. My tutor, Professor Terence Cave, was fantastic; he just brought it to life. I enjoyed studying Blaise Pascal; he writes in such beautiful, limpid, clear language. His writings are about convincing people to act – or be – a certain way in the moral sense. I just thought that was amazing; he is convincing you through the beauty of his words and the logic of his reasoning. training on the Key Stage 2 Framework – the manual, if you like – and we worked with local authorities individually. It was really successful because it was not an 'imposing' approach. It was very much collaborative. Some places were wealthy; others were very poor. Some places had tiny rural schools with several year groups in one class; some were great big set-ups. Or a mix of all of those. The conversation was always: 'What does "good" look like in your context?' By the end of those five years almost all primary schools were teaching languages. Even now, some primaries use that framework, and several key people from that time still lead on primary languages. Next you went into project-based work, supporting the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Modern Languages, the British Council and the British Academy, among others. Is that right? Yes. I see my job as sometimes almost journalistic – going out and finding out what's happening. I do a lot of collecting evidence. People email the APPG with concerns and suggestions. So I spend time organising that information and supporting the APPG so they can quickly engage with the issues. Often they will have questions themselves and I'll go off and investigate. Then there's organising events – APPG meetings (like mini conferences), meetings with stakeholders and ministers – or press releases or campaigns. It's really interesting work because it's so varied. From supporting the all-party group for languages to launching the Languages Gateway, Philip considers the impact of his work as a freelance consultant PHILIP HARDING-ESCH JOHN WORNE MEETS

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