It put me off flamenco for life
Clive and I met in 1987 when we were both teaching English at the British Council in Valencia, Spain. We were the same generation of teachers and were super keen. We really loved teaching, and although some of our colleagues were quite ambitious to ‘rise through the ranks’ and become Directors of Studies, we both felt that those were managerial roles, and we very much wanted to stay in the classroom.
Clive started writing before I did, and we got to know each other better when he was working on a course for OUP called OK! for teenagers doing English holiday courses in the UK. We both really respected each other as teachers, and he used to ask me to help him with units where he had got stuck. I remember one about can / can’t where he wanted a natural context. As I had small children at the time, I remember suggesting two mothers who had babies the same age and were boasting about what their children could do – I must have been enduring similar conversations at the time. I don’t think he ever used it, as obviously it was not a topic that teenagers would really identify with!
Clive then got offered a contract to write a two-level English course (Beginner and Pre-intermediate) for OUP with Paul Seligson, who was in fact the Director of Studies at the British Council at the time. Clive asked me to get involved and that was the beginning of my life writing English File. I started by writing the Teacher’s Book for English File 1. I had been doing a lot of teacher training as well as teaching, so I was very focused on the detail in which people prepared the lessons in which they were going to be observed. Every stage was worked out including exact timings, so that nothing could possibly go wrong, and that became our model for the Teacher’s Book. As full-time teachers (24 hours a week) we had also often suffered from the last-minute panic when you realised that you didn’t have enough material to last you though the class, and had to desperately search for some supplementary activity that would fit with whatever you were teaching. This was the inspiration behind the inclusion of all the photocopiable activities in the English File Teacher’s Books. I then became a co-author of the Student’s Book and Workbook for English File 2, the Pre-intermediate level, and from then on wrote all subsequent levels with Clive.
I often remember those early days of writing with Clive. We would sit together in the morning in his rather cold flat in the Calle Cadiz in Valencia, arguing everything through together until we reached an agreement. It was a fourth floor flat with no lift, so going to a bar for a coffee (the flat was sparsely supplied with food and drink, normally a yoghurt past its sell-by date and not much more) involved four floors down and then four up again, so we limited ourselves to just one mid-morning. Clive was also very into flamenco and was in the process of collecting magazines, each of which had a free CD. At this point he had collected about 24 or 25, which he wanted to listen to in order. They turned out to be totally unsuitable as background music for working and I finally managed to get them banned, but unfortunately it put me off flamenco for life!
After lunch, I rushed out to teach, often six consecutive hours. It was exhausting, but I suppose we were young (-ish), and the great thing was that we were able to try out every single exercise or reading text, which I think in many ways contributed to English File’s success. We even used to get colleagues to record dialogues that we were planning on using, though it was very difficult because normally one or other of us would collapse laughing, and it sometimes took over an hour to record a two-minute bit of dialogue!