Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)

Five: The Rise and Fall of the Aston Group

five The Rise and Fall of the Aston Group 55 A sudden change of pace Approaching my 40th year, I found myself back in England, but this time in its Second City—that of Birmingham in the West Midlands. Suddenly, many things were different. In Sudan, we had survived for five years without a telephone, either in the office or at home. If we wanted to make an occasional phone call, we either went to the nearby Department of Geology or to a neighbor (respectively). At Aston, phones were everywhere and, in the pre-email era, everywhere in fairly constant use. Travel was much easier: in the UK, internal travel had nothing of that complex expeditionary quality it had in Africa; external travel in Europe merely meant getting on a plane, with none of that laborious business in Khartoum of getting an exit-and-re-entry visa every time you ventured outside the country’s borders. In addition, I now reported to Dennis Ager, the Head of the Foreign Languages Department, an excellent administrator with a keen and enthusiastic entrepreneurial sense. Indeed, he had been able in part to create my tenured senior lecturer position because of successful contracts with the Libyan Government for year-long intensive ESP courses preparing Libyan students to enter British universities for science and engineering degrees. 124 Dennis Ager had also established a splendid group of contract lecturers : primus inter pares was Ray Williams, a specialist in EFL/ESP reading and one of the best colleagues I have ever had the privilege of working with; Meriel Bloor, a functional grammarian and discourse analyst ; Sandy Urquhart, another reading specialist and discourse analyst ; David Charles, a methodologist and an expert in oral skills, especially in business contexts; and David Hall, rather more of an ESP/EAP generalist. All too had overseas experience: among other appointments, Ray had taught in Zambia, Meriel in Botswana, Sandy in Saudi Arabia, David C. in Singapore, and David H. with Tony Dudley-Evans in Iran. The Aston Group would shortly be joined by David Wilson, who had co-written a number of textbooks in Finland, Jane Willis, a researcher put in charge of an R & D project in the exciting new technology of video, and, for a few years, by Phil Skeldon. There was also a permanent lecturer, Cathy Johns-Lewis, an expert in English speech and particularly its intonation, who had been organizing the university’s EAP programme for a number of years. We were ready to go. The official name of my new employer was The University of Aston in Birmingham; it had been upgraded from a College of Advanced Technology in 1966 and, subsequent to my time there, it would simplify its moniker to Aston University. This technological background gave it a non-traditional, forward-looking character, and there was a strong department of Applied Psychology, as well as an engaging group of people—whom I would later get to know—interested in the sociology of science. However, the innovative nature of this environment was perhaps most obvious in my home department of foreign languages, where Dennis Ager had set up degree programmes in French and German with none of the traditional emphases on literature or on the history of European languages. For example, if the Aston students were to read a work by Emile Zola, they would not do so as part of a study of the 19th -century naturalist novel, but for the documentary evidence it might provide about working class living conditions and cultural habits in 19th -century France. Additionally, there was a strong emphasis on translation skills, which allowed many graduates to get jobs in their chosen areas of specialization. 125 56 Evenings around the kitchen table with Tony I stayed with my old Libyan friend, Tony Dudley-Evans, for several months while we went through the slow process of selling our house in Leeds and buying one in Birmingham. Tony was living at that time (being recently divorced) in a small terrace house in the unglamourous Birmingham suburb of Selly Oak with his older child, Adrian. Tony worked for the Overseas Educational Studies Unit at Birmingham and I for the Language Studies Unit at Aston. We soon discovered that we were offering some similar courses, one being Report Writing for Overseas Graduate Students. We evolved a strategy whereby we would jointly prepare teaching materials sitting around the kitchen table, go off to our...