Interview with Dr Annie Hughes

Why did I join the Department?

I started working for the Department part time in 1989 and full time from 1991 until 2015. My area of specialisation was the teaching of English as a foreign language to young learners and I was the Director/Programme Leader of the MA in TEYL, a two-year, part-time distance programme. I was also the Department’s Erasmus Coordinator and liaised between other universities in Europe to create opportunities for staff and student exchanges.

Before I came to the Department I worked in the Middle East. I was working for the British Council in Qatar for about ten years. Before that I was in Iran, up to and during the Revolution, but previous to that my training and practice in schools had been as a mainstream and special needs teacher in primary and secondary education. I trained in London and did quite a lot of teaching in both London and Liverpool before going to the Middle East. Having the diverse training in mainstream, special education teaching then in foreign language work has really helped in my specialisation.

I came back to the UK to study for an MA in Applied Language and Linguistic Science, here at York, in 1986. After this I then worked with Graham Low who had just created the EFL unit the year I started my MA. Initially there were just the two of us working there. The EFL unit was a self-funded centre which supported overseas students on campus, created fairly interesting and dynamic courses for all sorts of people who wanted to either extend or practice their English Language knowledge and also courses for teachers who taught English as a foreign language. My responsibility in the EFL unit was to two-fold, to deliver the teacher training/development courses and also to create and establish specialist courses for Japanese learners of English from Japanese universities. It was really exciting to be involved with the development of each type of course and to try to make them particularly valuable for the students. Many of the learners were only in the UK for a few weeks; they needed classroom work but also to find out about the local British culture so the courses were designed to enable the students to interact with the local community and with local families. Students would visit local families for afternoon tea, go on trips into York and further afield and some stayed with local families for their stay.

The other aspect of my work was the teaching of English to young learners. I delivered courses to the British Council both here and overseas and the Unit had teachers coming from all over the world to take part in our courses. It was during those courses that I realised that a lot of teachers in TEYL wanted more professional development in order to take their own careers further. I felt very strongly that a masters in teaching English to Young Learners would be really valuable for them and yet there wasn’t one available anywhere, as far as I could see. However, there was a problem, in that these teachers could not easily come to York for a year because they had full time work and family commitments. These were mature students who would have never been able to take a year out of their lives to come to York, let alone afford one. So, and this is back in 1995, I worked on creating a distance masters programme for them. The EFL unit supported me in this and allowed a large pump-priming investment for the start-up costs of the programme. The EFL Unit technician and video cameraman, Huw Llewellyn-Jones and I, collected real examples of TEYL classrooms classrooms in action, and also interviewed EFL and young learner specialists in many different global locations. It was fantastic to get that funding and investment in order to enrich the programme materials so much.

I had to take the business case for the programme to the teaching committee at the University for the programme though luckily the Teaching Committee agreed it without any changes needed to it, which was fantastic. I then spent two years designing, creating and writing the materials for the programme with the first students enrolling in 1997. The programme has now been running for around 18 years and in that time we have had around 300 students graduate from the programme. I am very proud to say that many people now see it as the industry standard masters for TEYL teachers. The whole programme team (the tutors, technician, administrator and programme leader) was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s award in 2009 for its innovative approach to programme delivery and graduate programme staff induction.

What makes the Department special?

In my case I love the fact that I delivered a high quality, valuable and useful distance masters. I think it was really important that what my students got from the programme was immediately valuable in their classrooms. The other tutors on the programme were also specialists in TEYL they had a great wealth of experience and knowledge. They worked very closely with our students and because they were distance students the team spent a lot of time supporting them by Skype, telephone and email. The students were not only working on their individual programmes, they were also exchanging pedagogical ideas and expertise and we noticed that after people had finished the programme there was a lot of professional exchanging between those who met on the programme, which I think was wonderful spin-off for the students.

For me the EFL unit was able to reach out and offer programmes, courses and support to people globally. We have had over 50 countries represented on the MA in TEYL to date. People who were students on the programme ten or fifteen years ago still get in touch with me to enquire about their colleagues taking the course, too. It is great that these professional still see York as important in that respect and it is good that the the Department was able to offer such needed programmes.