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-What about your experiences as a teacher? Are there any moments that stand out as being the best?
-The best thing’s I have taught some interesting people including the Minister of Agriculture from Ethiopia. I taught the Iraqi ambassador to London before the Gulf conflict. I also taught Miss Italy, one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. I think that the highlights are when a student says “ I never thought I could learn the language. From the time I was a school child. I was told I wasn’t very good at languages, and you’ve made me feel that it’s possible I can do it.” That to me is perhaps the greatest satisfaction.
10. –I know from my own experiences of learning foreign languages, what I say usually convulses people with laughter. Is language learning a funny experience?
-Oh, yes. It involves, with adults, a kind of suspension of belief. You’re having to ask a person who, in their own country, is perhaps a managing director of a company employing 2,000 people, or a brain surgeon or a scientist, suddenly to act out a role as going into a sweet shop and buying a Mars bar, and speaking relatively simple English, and mistakes are made. And they’re amusing mistakes. but as long as people laugh, you know, you laugh with them rather than laugh at them. I found humor is a good anecdote to stress.
-And again, from your point of view, you’ve taught both beginners and advanced. Which do you prefer?
11. –In terms of seeing progress, beginners are, you know, this is a rather worn analogy, are little flowers that you know, that they come there, they can do nothing. And after just a couple minutes with you, they can say “my name is John Smith.” So I mean, from zero, you’ll see the progress very quickly. But with advanced students it’s much more difficult to see the progress. But in terms of one’s own, using one’s own skills, to follow the range of language that one possesses as a native speaker, advanced students are more satisfying intellectually.
-And looking to the future, do you always see time when people will be wanting to learn English?
12. –Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, as the world becomes a kind of global village, a kind of, a kind of materialistic-oriented consumer society, the demand for English will increase. I mean, the fall of the Warsaw Pact countries and Russian Communism, in my own school, has meant a flood of executives from East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia, eager to learn English. It’s rapidly becoming a kind of status symbol. For an educated man or woman, they, it is expected of their culture. And for themselves, they have a certain command of English. It’s a ???
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