Ron Carter is Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham. I visited him there on a sunny day in April, and we talked for a good hour and a half (despite him seeing me immediately after several appointments with PhD students).
Recently, Ron has been awarded an MBE. When I raised this, towards the end of our meeting, and asked him what it was in honour of, he shifted in his seat, smiled, and said, ‘What was it for? Well, I don’t know! These things come out of nowhere.’
Actually, it was for services to education, both higher education and in schools, and although recognised worldwide as a leading authority in English and linguistics, Ron is pretty happy that he has been recognised not as contributing to what might be construed as an esoteric academic body of work, but to education. As he said, ‘and that’s nice because it’s something I’ve always been interested in, without ever working in an education department’.
This exchange exemplifies the modest nature of Ron’s responses. Always reflective, considered and measured, Ron described his career almost as though it had happened by chance: ‘It’s difficult to look back and to say why you did things in a certain way.’ There was no assumption or expectation from Ron’s family that he would go to university, ‘but I did, partly because you are inspired by teachers at school who put you in a certain direction and then it just happens. You find you enjoy it, it gives you a lot of fulfilment and you stay with it.’ Despite this nonchalant description, Ron is deeply committed to English as a subject, leading a research centre in the English Studies department at the University of Nottingham, where he has now taught for 30 years. In that time he has secured major research grants from AHRC, ESRC and Cambridge University Press, and has written and edited more than 30 books and published over 100 academic papers in the fields of literary linguistics, language and education, applied linguistics and the teaching of English and in the new field of e-social science.
Looking through Ron’s long list of publications, it is striking that he continues to revisit literature among his wide-ranging work in English language and linguistics. We talked about this blended approach to English, and he explained that he has ended up in a department where he feels very comfortable, because he is surrounded by people who are passionate about both language and literature. A theme of our conversation was Ron’s lasting interest in how language illuminates literature and vice versa, and how both contribute to education in a broader sense.
Ron’s first degree was in Russian, as a main subject, with English as a subsidiary, and his interest in language underpins all of his work. He remembers beginning work in a teacher training college and becoming very interested in education and how language can help to inform developments within English departments in schools.
‘What you saw in the secondary schools was that literature is an essential part of a child’s development, but quite often what they also needed was guidance in literacy development. And that was an area that was not focussed on in the schools that I taught in as much as literary development. So, there was an awful lot of attention to narratives, to stories, to poetry, to creative writing, reading fiction, and so on, and while that is essential and very important to the development of the individual and the development of all sorts of skills and understandings, I didn’t feel it helped as much as it might have done with the nitty-gritty of constructing writing in other genres, writing non-fiction and developing an understanding of language structure and how that informs the building of texts and so on.
‘And working in a teacher training college, as I did for five or six years, I got very interested in how applying language understanding to literacy development actually paid off for the teachers and for the kids that I was working with. It was from that moment that I got more interested in linguistics and its potential, and in applied linguistics in particular. And things just developed from there.’
An additional factor that reinforced Ron’s interest in English language was working in schools in Birmingham as a young graduate, where there were many students for whom English was not a first language. ‘At that point, and subsequently working abroad in Singapore for 18 months, I got interested in ESOL, ESL, EFL, that sort of area. But this just confirmed developing interests in applied linguistics. So it’s a case of always seeing how you can use linguistics in ways to help people to learn languages better, or learn to use English better, be it their first, second or third or fourth language.’
As a true linguist, Ron is careful to define his terms. When I suggested that his work always appears to have an application to the real world, with a view to helping learning in some way – whether it be finding better ways of communicating the teaching of English as a second language or helping children with literacy – Ron voiced his doubts about the word ’applied’ when collocated with ’linguistics’. He did not want to distance himself from the theoretical base which all applied linguistics requires: hence, although he agreed that he was in the business of solving language problems out there in real communities of use, which required a commitment to engaging with those issues and those communities, he was still an academic in a university.
All the same, Ron now oversees a literacy scheme where 30–40 students from Nottingham University go out to volunteer in junior and secondary schools in an educationally disadvantaged area to help young people with literacy. ‘The students often do one-to-one reading, working very closely with the teachers in local junior schools, and the university sponsors an academy school so students also volunteer to work with Years 9 and 10 in secondary schools, talking about books – it’s literature, but more talking about it. Sometimes they do manipulation of texts, and for some of those with real behavioural problems, just talking to them for 40 minutes, on their own, one to one, which for most of those kids is a rare experience. The students get a lot out of it: they start off by thinking, understandably, that it’s a good CV item, but by the time they’ve done it for a year, and they do take it very seriously, they feel very fulfilled. The kids undoubtedly benefit. If they are from communities where reading is not something you do at home, then talking about books is certainly not something you do, helping with the basics of language construction is something that you don’t do and even just talking is something you don’t do. So it’s a drop in the ocean, but it’s a project here that the department is committed to, and there are increasing numbers of students each year that do it.’
Another of Ron’s passions is creativity. ‘Creativity is very important, but it has to be creativity seen as a common property, not something which is the exclusive preserve of a genius. I’m more interested in the way creativity manifests itself in everyday contexts, for all of us, whatever our intellectual or social or cultural backgrounds. I’m particularly interested in spoken language – everyday interactive speech, involving humour and word play – which has been neglected in moves to embrace creative writing. And it’s something that we all do. Everyone has a creative capacity and it manifests itself in language. I feel passionate about that, and about grammar as well.’ Ron sees a case for putting grammar back into the curriculum – ‘but in relation to real language use, spoken discourse as well as written discourse. Grammar that illuminates how texts work and grammar for creativity.’
However, he recognises that curricula are very full – at undergraduate level, and particularly at PGCE level – so his aim is to help in whatever way he can: hence the literacy scheme. ‘It’s an old-fashioned view, but unless you can handle language well in school you are always a step or two behind everyone else. You see generations of really intelligent kids not make it through the school system, not make it through to university, because of difficulties that they experience with literacy development.’
In relation to teacher training, his view is: ‘The more teachers know about how language works, the more they can help children to learn.’ This was the impetus behind the Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project, which Ron directed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Famously, the implementation of the project was banned by the Conservative Government, which, as Ron acknowledges, probably gave it much more publicity than it might otherwise have received. With his usual magnanimity, Ron described it as ‘an instructive time’, not least in recognising the difficulties of ‘engaging with the discourse of language issues in ways that make sense in the public domain’. There are positive outcomes in that a ’samizdat’ (clandestine/underground) publication from the project is still being used, ‘but more importantly, other projects have come about as a result.’
As we talked about the integration of English language and literature in university departments, in primary schools, and in secondary schools, the topic of the A Level in language recurred several times. Ron sees this as largely responsible for the changing profile of English undergraduates.
‘You and I would have come through an A-Level route where English was literature. That’s changed radically during the past 20 years, and now many, by no means all, students are very, very competent in language studies.’ He sees this as a benefit, particularly in relation to teaching in schools, but he is still grateful for his own literature background ‘because that sensitises me to how texts work’. Ultimately, he believes (referring to the renowned linguist Michael Halliday) that the relationship between language and meaning is what is important. ‘Literature lecturers find that the language work students do is enhancing their work in literature; and some people who were literature specialists are now language specialists. The subject is better if it is mutually informing.’
So what kind of a teacher is Ron? Again there is a pause, while Ron reflects. ‘I quite like anything that involves students in activities – that sounds very bland, but I’m more comfortable with situations where students are doing things, especially doing things with texts.’ Ron refers to the work of Ben Knights and Rob Pope in relation to transformation of texts. ‘You take a text, and the students, or you and the students, manipulate it in various ways – rewrite it in a different style, turn it from serious into humorous, change the genre, make the text operate in a different way – anything where the learning is activity based, doing things with texts. I’ve always liked that sort of teaching.’ He sees his role as inductive rather than didactic: ‘The students can get on the inside of the texts; they are forced to internalise it, to make it their own, to appropriate it, to theorise and re-theorise it, to inhabit it, therefore they feel more comfortable with it and that grounds their interpretations in a much more rigorous way.’ He contrasts this with his own university education, which consisted largely of ‘sitting around with six other students in a room, talking about texts – getting very good at talking about texts. But it’s not the same as getting involved. The more actively involved you are the better student you are.’
We talked about the influence of new technologies, both in terms of the study of language, and the impact on teaching and learning. Some of Ron Carter’s most recent work has been in the field of corpus linguistics, using databases of spoken discourse, which he says ‘has transformed the subject for me’. He sees the fact that he and his students can access millions of words on a computer in order to analyse language use in various ways as a huge benefit. He is currently working on follow-ups to his Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk (Routledge, 2004) and on further theory and application of linguistics, especially corpus linguistics, to literacy development in schools, in health-care communication and in cross-cultural business communication. With regard to technology in relation to teaching and learning, Ron described himself as a ’fence-sitter’, seeing both the advantages of multimodal forms of communication at a distance and the advantages of face-to-face interaction between tutor and student and between peers. The English department delivers a distance MA, which in many ways replicates attending in person with the use of podcasts of lectures, e-mails from tutors, bulletin boards for discussion and so on, and which Ron recognises allows many students to take the course who may not otherwise be able to. Typically, his conclusion was that we should work forward with the technology at our disposal, imbued with the knowledge we have about human communication: ‘It is a case of refining our understanding, and learning how to do it better, but based on the values we have learned. We know that mutual support is positive – from fellow students, from tutors, from identifying with an environment. So how do we reproduce that in a virtual environment? That’s what we should work on.’
Recurring phrases during the interview included: ‘and there’s nothing wrong with that’ (with reference to the prevalent view of ’correctness’ and Standard English which his work has endeavoured to expand); ‘and there are agendas you have to respect’ (the Tory Government who banned his LINC project); ‘and that doesn’t mean it’s better or worse than anything else’ (with reference to applied over pure linguistics); while a question about what advice he might give to a new lecturer met with some resistance to the idea of his giving advice at all. Although Ron is passionate about many aspects of his work in English language, an affable humility pervades. His words always acknowledge alternative perspectives and communities of practice beyond the potentially ’introverted’ environment of a university. He is interested in inclusivity, in improving children’s life chances, and always in understanding people better.
His interest in people cropped up again when we talked about what he might have been were he not an academic. Ron’s (no longer) secret alternative ambition is to have been a sports journalist. ‘Understanding the psychology of being at the peak of your powers in sport is something I find fascinating. And given that it is only a game, and there are parallels between sport and life, I think in another life I’d love to have written about football, golf or tennis, or some sport, for a newspaper. It probably sounds bizarre, but something to do with sports psychology – writing about it, studying it. Also learning a lot about yourself, about individuals and teams, and how they operate, how and why they succeed and fail (he is a Leeds Utd supporter!!). I would have liked to have done that.’
Lately, Ron has been re-reading the late 19th- and early 20th-century Russian fiction he read as an undergraduate, acknowledging a certain circularity to his reading career but finding new inspiration from familiar writers. Although he admits that the themes are not always those considered to induce pleasure – ‘indeed they may be thought more conducive to depression’ – he concedes, ‘but that’s all right. You don’t always read books to be made to laugh, and they are all very readable. I can see myself continuing to read them: there are lots of them, and they are usually very big books!’
