An Interview with Michael McCarthy, Jeanne McCarten, and Helen Sandiford

Cambridge: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Authors: Thanks for asking us. C: Could you tell us something about your backgrounds in ELT? What brought you together to work on Touchstone? What different skills and experience did you each bring to the project? Jeanne McCarten: Well, first of all, our backgrounds in English language teaching are very diverse, and among us we bring over 80 years of experience to the table. Mike, why don’t you go first?

Michael McCarthy: Sure. I started teaching English in 1966, 38 years ago, in Spain. Since then I’ve worked in five different countries in Europe and Asia, teaching all levels and all age groups. From 1981 I’ve worked at the university level, and I’ve become increasingly involved in teacher education and materials writing. I’ve worked at the universities of Birmingham and Nottingham in the UK, and rose to the rank of Professor – which means holding a Chair in the British system; my Chair was in Applied Linguistics. In the 1980s I was working at Birmingham with Professor John Sinclair, the great corpus pioneer. He created the first corpus-based dictionary for learners, the COBUILD Dictionary. I learned a lot about corpora which helped me in the creation of the CANCODE spoken corpus in the 1990s, with my colleague Ron Carter at the University of Nottingham. I’ve also spent periods in the U.S. as Visiting Professor at Cornell University and the Pennsylvania State University, in Egypt at the American University in Cairo, and in Spain at the University of Valencia. Right now I am Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, England, and Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, as well as Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Including Touchstone, I’ve written, edited, or collaborated on 30 books and more than 60 articles. Jeanne?

JM: Well, I taught English in Sweden, France, Great Britain, and Malaysia before I joined Cambridge University Press. As a publisher, I spent a lot of time researching what teachers want in their English teaching materials and I was privileged to work with some of the best ELT authors, developing course books, skills books, grammars, vocabulary and pronunciation texts. I was later responsible for publishing dictionaries and grammars, which were based on corpus research and was closely involved in the development of a spoken corpus project. I could see how corpora would be a wonderful resource for course books, not just dictionaries and grammars. Eventually I decided it was time to write some materials myself. I was already familiar with Mike and Helen’s work, so they were my natural choice of coauthors. OK, Helen. What about you?

Helen Sandiford: I spent nine years of my English teaching career in Japan, in high schools and colleges, and doing teacher-training seminars. It was there that I joined Cambridge University Press as a sales representative for English language teaching materials. I then relocated to Cambridge, England, from where I managed sales in Asia for the Press. It was during this time that the idea of writing materials became very appealing – it was a natural progression for me – and I started working closely with Jeanne and Mike.

About eight years ago we started thinking about the concept for a new, innovative project. It was something that had interested all of us for some time – writing a major ELT series – and it seemed as though we were a perfect fit with our various common and complementary experiences: in teaching, teacher training on four or five continents, years of research, and many years’ experience in publishing. On top of that we’re good friends. I think we make a unique team.

C: Why did you decide to write Touchstone? How is it different from other ELT series?

JM: We decided to write Touchstone because it was clear that there was a need for something new, something innovative. With our combined experience we felt we could contribute something special to the field of English language instruction.

Touchstone is similar in some ways to other texts on the market but it is very different in some important ways. The main difference is that we used the Cambridge International Corpus – a large database of conversations and texts – to help us develop the Touchstone syllabus. Studying a corpus gives you information about usage – what people actually say, in what kinds of contexts and with what kinds of language. It can also tell you what are the most frequent structures and vocabulary in spoken or written English. So we used information like this to guide us or to inform our syllabus. We call this a corpus-informed approach to writing materials. That’s because the Corpus has informed, but not dictated what we write. So, the language in Touchstone isn’t arbitrary– it comes from extensive research into what people really say and write.

So, Touchstone’s strength lies in the fact that we have brought the latest research into spoken language into the classroom, and at the same time we provide material that will be familiar to teachers and is easy to teach. It’s different in that it has a new syllabus strand of conversation strategy skills that help students manage conversations. For example: starting and ending conversations, keeping a conversation going, changing topics and so on. And it brings factual information from our research directly into the materials. We know precisely what vocabulary, grammar, and expressions are most frequently used in American English conversation.

Touchstone also spends a lot of time helping students learn vocabulary, which we believe is one of the hardest and most important learning challenges. We have a feature in each unit called the Vocabulary Notebook. It’s a page that shows students different ways to record and organize their vocabulary, and also what kinds of vocabulary to make note of: collocations, whole expressions, what to write down about verbs, and many more ideas like these.

C: Professor McCarthy, you, in particular, have written a number of books in the Vocabulary in Use series, as well as other titles that examine the Corpus in detail. Is putting authentic language into a course the culmination of all that research and practice in using the Corpus?

MM: Yes, indeed. The work on creating the syllabuses for the vocabulary texts was corpus-informed, and it taught me just how important vocabulary is, and how it can be better organized for learning. What’s more, I’ve just completed a thousand-page reference grammar of English with my colleague Ron Carter for Cambridge University Press. It will be out in March, 2006. It’s also corpus-informed and has helped the Touchstone team get a better sense of the systematic organization of grammar, especially spoken grammar, in our corpus research on American English. The great thing about corpus research is that you never finish! There’s still a lot of exciting work going on, which we’ll be sharing with you in the different Touchstone levels.

C: You said earlier that Touchstone is corpus-informed. What kind of method or approach is this and how does it differ from previous ELT course books?

HS: A corpus doesn’t give you a teaching method as such, but it is a wonderful resource to have as a source of extracts and ideas as well as more statistical information about language. The Corpus changes the way you look at language, especially conversation. So Touchstone includes lots of everyday conversational language that was previously ignored in course books, but that’s really useful for students to know. Expressions that will help them gain time to think, or restate their ideas, end conversations, soften or strengthen their message.

As one-time language learners ourselves, we have found that a good approach to learning any language is to be an observer of that language. As users of the Corpus, we’ve done a lot of observation of our own language in recent years, too! As a student, you learn from teachers and materials; as an observer you listen to or read extracts of the language and notice things about it for yourself, things that you can later discuss with a teacher or other users of the language. In Touchstone we’ve created opportunities for students to observe, to notice, and to figure things out about English as one of the steps in the teaching/learning process. So, for example, students are encouraged to figure something out about a structure before it is formally presented, or they are asked to find more examples of a conversation strategy in a dialog. The activities in Touchstone are guided and achievable, and we hope they will motivate students to become observers outside class and as a result become better learners.

C: Do you think teachers need special knowledge of corpus linguistics to use this course?

MM: Oh no, not at all. They don’t need any special knowledge to use the course successfully. But teachers can feel confident that we, the authors, have used the Corpus to check the frequency and patterns of words in the language in Touchstone, as well as the accuracy of the statements we make about it in the books. And they can also be sure that the examples of language we give whether in presentations, listening texts, or just in exercises are a reflection of real usage. For teachers who are interested in learning more about the information the Corpus gives us, the Teacher’s Edition includes language notes that further explore the structures and vocabulary in Touchstone.

C: What challenges and difficulties did you face writing Touchstone?

HS: One of the biggest challenges was taking a new concept and finding ways of presenting it in a textbook, so that it becomes something concrete and easy to use in the classroom. We wanted Touchstone to be really exciting and innovative, and the question was, how do you actually do that? It’s a challenge, but we’re confident that we’ve succeeded! We have really enjoyed writing Touchstone over the last six years. We’ve had such a lot of support from teachers, and the Cambridge sales teams in the markets – and of course from the superb editorial team in New York. We’ve been very lucky.

C: What do you think is the future of corpora in language teaching? Are we at the beginning of an ELT revolution in terms of the way we look at language and how we teach it?

JM: We think so. Just as corpora are now an indispensable tool in writing dictionaries, they will be used increasingly by authors of all kinds of materials. And corpora will become more and more specialized, so that, for instance, business materials will be informed by business corpora composed of conversations or texts taken from real business contexts. We’ll be able to tailor materials more precisely for students’ needs. And as technology progresses, there will be more and more opportunities to make language real, by using multimedia technology for example.

C: Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. We wish you every success with Touchstone.