改版的《跟我學》保留了第一版《跟我學》的諸多優點。其一，依然由60集組成，包括60個主題，涵蓋了日常生活中常用的10項語言功能，而且每學10課後會針對已學的語言功能言功能相似，可以使學習者溫故而知新。其二，保留了由BBC廣播公司《跟我學》劇組拍攝的原版情景劇。生動、滑稽的表演充分體現了英國人的幽默感，加上純正的英式發音，給人帶來真正的視聽享受；其三，在情景劇中間，穿插了與情景劇語言功能相關的實景對話和歌曲，便於學習者擴展所學的語言知識；其四，我們在其中40集裡穿插了一個句為Follow Me to Britain的紀錄片，向學習者介紹英國的本土文化，使學習者有身臨英國的感覺；其五，其作20集裡穿插播放了4個系列短劇，情節起伏跌宕，生動有趣。
My late husband, Louis Alexander, was born on 15 January 1932, and died on 17th June 2002. He published his first book, Sixty Steps to Précis, in 1962, and for the rest of his life, he continued to travel, to research, to write and to publish at a furious rate. You have a list of his published works here.
Julia Alexander
When Louis was travelling and meeting people, one of the obvious questions they would ask him, in fascinated tones, was how many books he had published. Although this question may seem obvious and reasonable, Louis would gently explain that it was not possible to count how many books he had written. ‘For,’ he said, ‘how can you define a ‘book’? A little story, such as April Fool’s Day has only thirty-two pages, and is written in a day or two. A four-level course, like Look, Listen and Learn, has 4 Pupil’s books, 8 Workbooks, 4 Teacher’s Books and 8 storybooks. It took five years to write. Both these are separate titles, but they cannot in any way be compared.’
Looking at the list of his works, therefore, we should avoid making a crude tally of their number. The point is that they represent forty years of committed hard work and creativity by a man who had thoughts and ideas flying from his fingertips. He was a Colossus by any standards. His work defined the field of English as a Foreign Language, in terms of teaching, and in terms of publishing. Nothing has happened in the field during his lifetime and since his death that he did not prefigure in his work. He laid down the map of the subject for others to follow.
Louis always knew he was going to be a writer. As a small child, he wrote a ‘magazine’ of articles and stories which he shared with his friends. Later, he wrote for, and edited, the magazines of his school and university. He also directed his fellow students in some of Shakespeare’s plays, played the piano, wrote poetry, went climbing in Wales and Scotland, and studied his chosen subject – English Language and Literature – with passion.
After university, for his military service, he was sent to the British Army’s Higher Education Centre in Germany. His job there was to teach men who were about to go back to civilian life. They needed to pass public examinations, so as to get a good start once they left the army. Those 2 years in the Army represented the perfect preparation for his life-work. His students had only 6 weeks to master the material needed for their exams. Their success depended on truly efficient teaching. Louis got excellent results by planning every detail of the syllabus and writing materials to match. He also employed one of the locals to give him private lessons in German. This was his first language syllabus, created for his own needs, since of course he decided what he wanted to know, and how he wanted to learn. His teacher administered the lessons according to Louis’ plan. Louis had already learned French in school and Greek by listening to his father’s friends, but this time, he was in charge of his own language lessons. He learned German by comparing and contrasting it with English, and so began to look at English inside out. And finally, it may not seem important, but it is basic, that he taught himself at that time to touch-type with great speed and accuracy. Typing was for him as easy as breathing. How else could he have written so much?
I have explained this to you in some detail, so as to illustrate how Louis worked. He had an extremely high energy-level. That was his nature. He was also very self-disciplined. In every area of his life, he would define what had to be done, and then work steadily towards the target. Because he knew what he was doing, he was very patient. Some things take a long time. For example, The Longman English Grammar took seven years to write, and he wrote seven editions in manuscript before it was published. The task of writing a reference work was to decide what to say, then to refine how to say it, and finally to decide what not to say. His aim in all his work was to cut through to the essence of the language, and he knew when he had done so.
The list of Louis’ published works is rather like a map of my own life, since I taught New Concept English and Look, Listen and Learn before I ever met him – and I recognized their greatness immediately. They freed me to become a really good teacher, so that I enjoyed my work. When Longman took me on as a teacher-trainer, I was in a position to follow all Louis’ works as he wrote them, for a period of nearly nine years. Before I got to know him well personally, I observed his work from inside Longman as a privileged observer. I could see that he was working at the cutting edge of syllabus and materials development, and that he was as much at home in the classrooms of developing countries, like Brazil and Egypt, as he was in the highest academic committees of the Council of Europe. I could also see a man who was really keen on new technology. He wrote for all new audio-visual media as soon as they became available, so that he was working in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning as early as 1979, long before anyone else. The publications of those years included a number of course-books, including Target, Mainline, Follow Me, and the first ever Computer-Assisted Language Courses (published by EMI/Longman with Atari for French, Spanish, German , and Italian).
At the end of those nine years, I married Louis in 1980, and we were invited to come to China the following year. We had a wonderful time here, and were pleased and excited by the connexions we made Soon after that, Louis was invited to provide the blueprint and to advise on Junior English for China, written by Neville Grant and published by The People’s Education Press, Beijing in collaboration with Longman, and sponsored by UNESCO.
In the 1980’s, Louis’ preoccupation with syllabus and learning-processes led him to write reference works rather than course books. In this period, he wrote The Longman English Grammar, The Longman Advanced Grammar and Right Word, Wrong Word. This was a quiet time of deep concentration and seriousness, bringing together all the different insights he had had. By 1992, Louis was ready to write another course. He approached Longman with a proposal to write a course for complete beginners upwards. His plan was to provide a bi-lingualised course, in which every aspect of the syllabus would be defined, so that the student would have full control over the material as he progressed, and would not be dependent on the teacher to mediate any gaps or difficulties. This is a quotation from a letter Louis wrote to his publisher, Michael Johnson, at the time:
I strongly believe we have to work from the bottom upwards, so as to exercise absolute control in the development of the entire course, so there are no inexplicable non-sequiturs and items that haven't properly been accounted for. The basis of the entire undertaking is an accurate definition of levels. You can only really describe a level if it is based on a well-defined syllabus. It comes back to the old contrast between attainment and proficiency. To measure attainment, you need an immutable, objective syllabus which applies equally to everybody. Students and teachers thus have the reassurance of knowing what they have to cover and what they will be tested in. Proficiency is measured by real-life performance, and some students will become more proficient more rapidly than others, but by such a rigorous definition of level, we shall give all learners the maximum opportunity to account for everything in each level as they progress, regardless of whether their teachers are brilliant or not.
Longman’s response to this proposal surprised and delighted him. Instead of letting Louis work alone on a self-study course for those learning English by reading, the publisher, Michael Johnson, proposed a multi-media course, with a bilingual component, with investment on a scale that no publisher had undertaken since Follow Me.
Louis had strong views about the use multi-media teaching purposes. He believed that all communications media should be true to their type: that film should be real film, that radio should be real radio, that course-books should be written by professional authors, and so on. There are only two English Language teaching courses that have ever been published that fit this requirement, and Louis Alexander was the author of both of them. One is Follow Me, and the other is Direct English. All the rest fit into one of two categories:
the first, either the books are written first, and the films follow. Because they are made by teachers and course-writers, they are not ‘real film’, or ‘real TV’. They can be very dull, because they tend to use the screen like a blackboard.
- the second, the films are made by TV and film professionals, who also devise the teaching materials. Because they have no syllabus, they do not serve the purposes of teachers and learners, even if they seem to be amusing.
Follow Me was financed by the German Government. It included network TV, radio and classroom materials. All of these were prepared by experts in the media concerned, but all were locked together by the mighty syllabus Louis had created. The course-material and the multi-media were created together, but each product was true to itself. That’s why it was so successful. In the early 1980’s, Follow Me was viewed by more than a billion learners world-wide.
When Michael Johnson proposed to Louis that he write Direct English, Louis knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to deploy all the insights he had ever had about language, syllabus-design and the learning process into one great course, addressed directly to the learner. Given the opportunity to use all available media, he wanted the film and CD-Rom material to be created seamlessly, together with the Student’s Books and the bi-lingual Companions. He wanted to work closely with a specialist scriptwriter and film-maker, and with specialist designers of CD-Roms. He himself would write the course-books, and he would write the language-analysis to be addressed to the learner in his own language. The Learner’s Companion would be the bi-lingual component, and he and the Editor would take specialist advice on the adaptation to each different language, so as to take account of the different problems of mother-tongue interference. Above all, he wanted to work in a small, closely-knit team. This is what Michael Johnson offered him, when he commissioned Direct English. It was a dream-project. He was in an author’s heaven!
Discussions began in 1992, and by the end of 1993, they had defined the syllabuses and the working method. By the end of May 1994, Louis had submitted the finished script for his pilot-version of Book 1 – the first 3 Levels. This was sent out for trials world-wide, including to Shanghai. Of course, Louis’ name was not attached to the pilot version. We were charmed by a perceptive commentator in Shanghai, who remarked, ‘This material would be successful if it were by L.G. Alexander, and the author has been successful in imitating him. But since it is not by him, it is unlikely to emulate the success of New Concept English.’
Although Louis had written the story-line for the pilot version in British English, it was always intended that the film-sequences would be written by a professional script-writer, who would take Louis’ scripts as a demonstration of the language syllabus, and generate a completely new story-line, written in American English, and set in America. In May 1994, Longman commissioned a documentary film-maker, Mike Raggett, and Mike brought in Daisy Scott, an experienced script-writer from Boston who quickly understood the dimensions of the syllabus. Daisy wrote the 27 dialogues for Level One in collaboration with Louis. She generated the story, and Louis kept her within the syllabus, while not interfering with her American English. Then everyone, including Louis, went to Boston for the filming. Meanwhile, Louis wrote the rest of the material for each level, developing the language, the characters and the plot as he went, and sending each unit as he worked to an American English language specialist, Ellen Shore, at the University of Nevada. Ellen advised on American idiom, and Louis adjusted his material until she accepted it as real American English. (The differences between British and American English are mainly phonological, though there are also some lexical and stylistic differences, especially in the spoken language. Grammatical differences are really very few.) And this process was repeated for the next two levels as well. The writing continued into 1998. By 1999, the ongoing tasks were mainly editorial, to do with the production of language-specific versions of Direct English for all the different languages. This was carried forward by Sarah Gumbrell, Louis’ Editor, the best Editor he ever had. This process continues today, as you can see now, with the Chinese Edition that has been prepared with FLTRP.
In preparing this document, I have gone back through the letters-file from that period, and I am struck, as I have always been, by Louis’ cheerful curiosity, his generosity towards his colleagues, and the sheer, affectionate, burning energy of the man. His tone is always bright and optimistic, and his work rhythm as steady as a power station. He was also working on New Concept English Chinese New Edition, published by FLTRP at the end of 1997, though the work on the new Teacher’s Books and Workbooks for that edition continued until 2001. I note in his letters that he was annoyed to have very bad flu several times in 93, 94 and 95, since it wasted his time and was very boring. I remember saying to him that he was working too hard, and that we needed to take more time out. He brushed my concerns aside. He was happy. He would never retire. He was doing what he wanted to do.
In January 1998, we learned that he had a very serious blood-disease. Even so, he still pursued all the things that had always mattered to him. He was determined to go on being like himself. He still worked, still communicated constantly with his friends and colleagues, went to concerts and art-galleries, and lived every minute of every day with the same intensity. In one of his periods of illness, he was deeply pleased when Mr. Li Pengyi visited him in hospital in London. Meanwhile, the news about Direct English was excellent. People liked it. It had the lowest ‘drop-out rate’ of any course ever written; 98% of people inscribed for Level One went on to do Level Two. We talked a lot about Direct English. He and I were cheerfully convinced that it was his best course – that he had achieved his desire to realise, in one great work, the insights that he had gained through 40 years of tireless work in the field of English Language teaching and learning. The bi-lingualisation into so many different languages world-wide was slow, but each new issue was followed by success with the learners.
Today marks the launch of Direct English Chinese Edition. As our partners in New Concept English, FLTRP are the natural home for L.G. Alexander’s last, finest, most complete course. It is a matter of great personal satisfaction to me to be here for such an event. I thank Mr. Li Pengyi and his valued colleagues at FLTRP for their kindness and loyal hard work, and congratulate them on the quality of the books. My particular thanks go to Ms Zhang Lixin for her attentive and intelligent editing. I wish every success to Direct English in China, and hope that every learner who takes it up may feel entertained, and engaged, and confident in the learning of English as a International Language.
Julia Alexander
Beijing
22 September 2005
先夫路易斯·亞歷山大生於1932年1月15日，逝於2002年6月17日。自1962年他的第一本著作 Sixty Steps to Précis 出版以來，他一直暢遊各地，致力於研究、寫作和出版 。現附上他的著作年表。
許多人都曾驚奇地問路易斯，他到底出版了多少書籍。這個問題似乎很容易回答，但路易斯會溫和地解釋說，他寫了多少書，是無法統計出來的。他說：“你如何定義‘書’呢？像 April Fool’s Day 這樣的一個小故事，只有32頁，用一兩天就能寫完。而像《看、聽、學》這樣的一套四級教程，有4本學生用書，8本練習冊，4本教師用書和8本故事書，花了5年的時間才完成。兩者都是‘書’，但完全不具可比性。”
80年代，路易斯開始將工作重心轉移到編寫教輔上。他陸續出版了《朗文英語語法》、《朗文高級語法》和Right Word, Wrong Word。這段時期，他一直在思考如何融合他所吸收的各種理念，為出版新教材做準備。到1992年，路易斯覺得時機已經成熟。他向朗文提交了一個教程編寫方案，針對群體是零起點的初學者。他的目標是為學習者提供一個雙語教材，教材的每一方面都有詳盡說明，學習者可以自主控制進度，不需依賴教師來解決困難。
