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Three decades of work for the Council of Europe

John Trim was born in 1924. His father was a docker and his mother was the daughter of a printer; both were active in the local Workers’ Educational Association. John described the atmosphere of his home as ‘intellectual, internationalist and socialist’. He won a scholarship from his primary school to Leyton High School, where he learned French and German. For the first term – which John missed because he had pneumonia – his French teacher taught the language entirely in phonetic transcription in order to lay the foundations of accurate pronunciation. In his second year John had to choose between Latin and German. He chose German because he was not yet thinking in terms of university, and here too he encountered a teaching approach that was strongly oral. From these beginnings John went on to become a leading phonetician, a founding father of applied linguistics, director of the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (and ex officio editor of Language Teaching and Research Abstracts), adviser to the Council of Europe’s modern languages projects for three decades, and a powerful advocate of communicative approaches to language teaching and learning. In the summer of 2011 we recorded an extended conversation with John Trim in which we ranged widely over his family background and education, his academic career at University College London and Cambridge, the years he spent as director of CILT, his extensive experience of language education policy development and implementation, and his three decades of work for the Council of Europe. What follows is the second of two extracts from the recorded conversation. The first extract, which draws on all the topics we discussed apart from the Council of Europe work, was published in Language Teaching 46.3.