© Oxford University Press 2006
Christopher Brumfit, 1940–2006
April 2006.
Christopher Brumfit died on March 18th this year, as fate would have it just a few months after the appearance of a special issue of Applied Linguistics which would have been a particularly fitting commemoration of the man and his work. The theme of that special issue was ‘Applied Linguistics and real-world problems’, a title, which, as is pointed out in the editorial, derives from Brumfit's own definition of the field as ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue.’
Such a definition is general enough to cover a wide range of enquiry and Brumfit's own particular concern was with problems to do with language education. Such problems in the real world would no doubt have impressed themselves on his attention when, on completion of his studies at Brasenose College Oxford, he went to teach English at the Tabora Government Boys’ School in Tanzania. Four years later, in 1969, he was appointed lecturer in English methodology at the University of Dar es Salaam, and produced his first book: A Handbook for English Teachers. His career in Applied Linguistics had begun. He may not have called it that at the time, but on his return to the UK in 1972, he acquired the formal credentials of an MA in Applied Linguistics at Essex, getting a distinction into the bargain. After two years as lecturer in English and Linguistics at the City of Birmingham College of Education, he was then, in 1974, to my own great good fortune, appointed as lecturer in what was then the Department of English as a Foreign Language at the University of London Institute of Education. I arrived in 1977, and there he was, already making his distinctive intellectual mark.
What was so distinctive, and inspiring, about his intellect was its independence. Rather than accept current ideas or conventional assumptions, he would submit them to scrutiny. This was the kind of non-conformist critical thinking that he encouraged his students to engage in, and that informed his own research and writing. At that time, in London, he was applying it in particular to communicative language teaching, a relatively recent development in those days. It was an approach he endorsed in principle and indeed the book he edited with Keith Johnson in 1979, The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching, was very influential in making it widely known. He followed this up with his own closely and analytically argued discussion of the approach in his book Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching. But these books were not designed to promote a kind of practice, but to present arguments, to examine the principles of the approach, and so provide the means whereby teachers could also think for themselves, and so take an informed decision about how appropriate it was for their circumstances.
Abstract principle and actual practice – how they are to be related, and how far they can be reconciled, is a theme that runs through all Christopher Brumfit's work. It represents a kind of active and creative interplay of contraries that seems to have been central to his whole way of thinking. He was on the one hand an idealist, an intellectual who delighted in rational and fictional abstraction, whether expounded in the philosophy of Karl Popper, or represented in the novels of Dostoevsky. On the other hand, he was a realist who recognized the need to make ideas operational in practice, a pragmatist who knew how to compromise and negotiate and get things done. What was remarkable about him was the way he would achieve a symbiosis between the two. And for him, I think, Applied Linguistics was just such a symbiotic activity. Real world problems called for an investigation in which the theoretical and the empirical are not complementary, but mutually modify each other.
Christopher Brumfit's thinking was radical by being rigorous, creative by being critical. What was most impressive, and influential, about him was that he made people think about things in ways that would not otherwise occur to them. He had a way of drawing an implication or shifting perspective to reveal things you had not noticed. In conversation, he would often take you by surprise with an unusually acute observation in passing about some current fashionable notion, some recent trend or other. But then there would also be the mischievous remark with a twinkle in the eye, and tongue (quite literally) in cheek, the wry smile. For there was far more to him than intellect, impressive though that was. There was his love of literature, and his awareness of its significance as representing realities beyond reason, the aesthetic pleasure he got out of the play of both ideas and language. There was a sensitivity which enabled him to engage with students and colleagues alike, and a deep seated humanism that led to an active concern for moral issues, for social justice and the opportunity for individual self realization. He never forgot that the real world problems that Applied Linguistics is concerned with have to do with people, not experimental subjects or social categories but essentially with individuals. Significantly, the last book he wrote was entitled Individual Freedom in Language Teaching, written when already suffering from his illness.
His influence on the field of Applied Linguistics, and particularly as it concerned language education, was enormous. And yet he was not the kind of person one would normally expect to exert such influence. For he was not a dominant or flamboyant figure, but was on the contrary rather diffident and non-assertive in manner, socially rather awkward at times – qualities, one might think, not obviously suited to leadership. But then he was never a leader in the sense that he was at the head of some new movement or school of thought. He was critical without being a critical linguist, concerned with socio-cultural aspects of language learning without being an adherent of socio-cultural theory. He embraced no creed, bore no banner for followers to march behind. For what made him so influential was not any particular line of thought but the very manner of his thinking. He showed us how to examine and evaluate ideas and practices and to be aware of their implications.
Applied Linguistics as an investigation into real-world problems and how to deal with them is impressively exemplified throughout all of Christopher Brumfit's work. And he was in his own unique way practising it right to the end of his life. In spite of pain, he kept on reading. Just a week or so before his death he told me that he had been re-reading Elizabethan poetry and with a fresh awareness of its meaning. It was so characteristic of him that he could find something positive in being afflicted with terminal cancer. And so consistent with his way of thinking about Applied Linguistics that he should show so poignantly how a use of language, seemingly so remote from current reality, could be made relevant to the most difficult, and ultimately unresolvable, real world problems of human life.
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