About the Authors
Aileen Bloomer
Language has always fascinated me and it was no surprise to my family that I ended up ‘doing something with language’. I enjoyed parsing (now called analysing) sentences when I was at school, probably, at least partly, because I used to get them right (so got good marks) and I found it fun to see how the same words in a different order could lead to different analyses and different meanings. I enjoyed learning foreign languages (French, German and Latin) and I read French (with Philosophy) at the University of Warwick. I taught French for some years and was interested in why some of my students seemed to have a much greater propensity for learning languages than others. Then I was overcome by a desire to see more of the world and its peoples — again, not a surprise to my family.
After several years working in Europe I went to the University of Lancaster to do an MA in English Language Teaching. That opened up more work opportunities in further flung countries, and offered me more opportunities for ‘people watching’ and for seeing how individuals learn and manage more than one language in their everyday life. Many events have remained with me very clearly, of course, but some of the language and communication ones might bear retelling. I walked into an EFL class in a small town north of Hanoi at a time when I spoke literally not a word of Vietnamese and my students (equally literally) not a word of English. Six months later many of them were good enough at English to enrol on a language course for interpreters. While I was working there, for the first time in my life I was officially and quite formally banned from talking about certain historical events — a restriction that I found both frustrating and disturbing. During my first visit to Beijing, I went into a restaurant where the menu was, quite reasonably, written only in Chinese (not a language that I knew at all and I certainly could not read it) and I was hungry. I shall never know whether I ate the menu items that I pointed to (definitely non-verbal communication) or whether the waiter and the chef took pity on me and simply gave me a very good meal.
I worked at York St John University for many years and throughout that time found that one of the most satisfying parts of my job was to see students learn and to see them get excited about the apparently inexhaustible possibilities of language. I saw no point in teaching if my students were not learning. The coursebook, Introducing Language in Use, emerged from the first year undergraduate module that we taught at YSJ. It was an obvious next step to encourage the students to read not just their tutors' opinions and writing but other linguists' writing and hence the Reader, Introducing Language in Use: a Reader. It seemed sensible to provide some guidance and scaffolding for students to find their way into the individual texts, to group those readings from a wide range of linguistics according to topic and to recognise the huge variety of topics studied under the banner of linguistics and to encourage students to find the confidence simply to browse the vast resources that are available from reputable, peer-assessed sources (unlike much that is on the Internet).
If all of that sounds terribly worthy and serious, I have always believed that life is for living and for having fun. I retired from full time work at YSJ in 2007 but keep up to date with linguistic work out of simple interest. And now I can read the stuff that I want to read with no external compulsion to read something else. It is a new work-life balance that I am thoroughly enjoying. Retirement also means that you can do the work that you want to do rather than that which the university might think you ought to do — hence choosing to work on the Reader. When not directly thinking about language and when needing to do something active, I ring church bells and remain fascinated both by the art and by the way bell-ringers use language to talk about it. One day I will find out why we bell-ringers use terms such as touch, bob, lead in the way we do. There are still times when I listen to the experts and think they are talking a foreign language — something like when I talk to computer experts and know all the words but have no idea what they are talking about. Travelling remains a great delight and interest, whether in the UK or further afield and lots of people find lots of jobs in York to keep me more than well entertained.
Publications
- Bloomer, A., Griffiths, P. and Merrison, A.J. (2005) Introducing Language in Use, London: Routledge.
- Griffiths, P., Merrison, A.J. and Bloomer, A. (2009) Language in Use: a Reader, Abingdon: Routledge.
- Wray, A.M. and Bloomer, A.M. (2006) Projects in Linguistics, 2nd edition, London: Hodder Arnold.
- Wray, A.M., Trott, K.M. and Bloomer, A.M. (1998) Projects in Linguistics, London: Arnold.