10 The Linguist Vol/56 No/1 2017
www.ciol.org.uk
AWARDS FOCUS
Former Director of Languages Lid King reveals his journey with
languages, and his hopes and fears for the future. By Miranda Moore
L
id King is in reflective mood. The
Director of the Languages Company is
here to talk to me about his personal
and professional journey with languages –
from unofficial family interpreter on holidays
in France to a lifelong fascination with
Greek – but it's been a turbulent year for
crosscultural understanding in the UK and the
conversation soon turns to changing attitudes
towards languages and language learning.
"Multiculturalism has become a dirty word,"
he laments. "There is a desire to move back
to some mythical monolingual, mono-national
past. Language organisations must keep
making the point that multilingualism is not
weird; on the contrary, the whole world is
multilingual, the whole world is multicultural."
The situation has deteriorated in the wake
of the referendum result, but even before
then, languages education in the UK was
being undermined, he adds. "A big turning
point was the 2010 election and the ongoing
economic crisis. The coalition government
cut funding for languages education." At
the time, King was National Director of
Languages, implementing a national strategy,
but within a year that role too – along with
the strategy itself – had been axed.
The pervasive cuts became a rallying cry
for people interested in languages across the
country, and soon King had joined Mike Kelly
and others in setting up Speak to the Future
(S2F), the campaign for languages, which he
initially chaired. "Speak to the Future arose to
compensate for the fact that there wouldn't
be a strategy as such," he explains. "One
hopes that people will get the support they
need and will be brought together – and
there are signs of some of that happening."
King's own career began at a more
optimistic time. After 14 years working as a
secondary French teacher, mainly in schools
in deprived areas of London, he joined CILT,
the National Centre for Languages, in 1989
and became Director three years later. He
had long been interested in pedagogy and
teaching methodology, and had been running
in-service training for a number of years.
"Lots of changes were happening, which most
people thought were for the better: the GCSE
came in, new A levels, more communicative
approaches, so there was a lot of interest
and discussion." In fact, the main challenge
King of
strategy
"I'm afraid our
society's become a bit
like a strict school
that doesn't work"
