Colleagues
Michael Byram
Professor Emeritus, School of Education, University of Durham
I had the honour of giving the Eric Hawkins Lecture at the Language Awareness conference in Kassel, Germany, in July 2010 and extract the following as my tribute:
I first got to know Eric Hawkins when I was a secondary school teacher of French and German in the 1970s. I attended one of the courses he and his colleagues organised at the University of York. The course was a complex tandem-based experience. Half the participants were French teachers of English and half were English teachers of French. Sometimes we worked in French/English groups or pairs, sometimes in English only or French only groups. It was extremely stimulating and enjoyable, and reflected the commitment of the York team under Eric to work directly with teachers.
My next opportunity to work with Eric came a little later but when I had just moved from teaching to teacher training and had been experimenting with work in what I later learnt to call 'language awareness', or what Eric preferred to call 'awareness of language'. Having written a short article about this, I was invited to join a working group under John Trim's chairmanship at the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) which included Eric and several others. It was a wonderful experience to see how two major figures - Eric and John - worked with newcomers such as myself. They encouraged and respected what we said and wrote, and this was just another instance of how Eric quietly and gently helped people to think differently about languages and language teaching. As for many others, Eric has been for me a person to emulate for his commitment to language teaching practice infused by scholarship and research.