Le Gordon Wells
With a multilingual trip down Memory Lane, Island Voices visits Central England, in a new contribution to the CIALL-supported “Extensions” initiative. This collection comprises a short documentary introduction – available in various community languages now spoken in the UK – plus a range of recorded conversations and interviews about the 1980s Industrial Language Training (ILT) service, each recorded in a particular language, but made accessible for non-speakers or learners of that language through YouTube subtitling and/or a supporting Clilstore transcript.
Scripted Documentary
The documentary uses a scripted narrative to follow three Birmingham ILT workers as they meet together for the first time in 40 years in their old workplace. The film introduces various aspects of the ILT programme, from onsite teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) to training and advice in Equal Opportunities and Anti-Racism, as well as innovative support for Community Languages. Team members also visit other key locations and organisations, such as the office of NATECLA, the National Association for the Teaching of English and other Community Languages to Adults, and recall the BBC “Hindi Urdu Bol Chaal Club” in a Soho Road restaurant. Multiple versions of the film are available in English, Gaelic, Jamaican, Welsh, and nine of the South Asian languages spoken most widely in the UK by census results.
Here’s the English version:
And here’s the Clilstore English transcript, with the video embedded, incorporating one-click access to online dictionary support for any unfamiliar vocabulary: https://multidict.net/cs/12354
To see the video narrated in another language, click on the landscape poster (or phone-friendly portrait option) to choose your own preferred version of the documentary. Or choose from the table below for the equivalent Clilstore unit.
| Bangla | Gaelic | Gujarati | Hindi |
| Jamaican | Malayalam | Nepali | Punjabi |
| Tamil | Telugu | Urdu | Welsh |
Free Conversation
The interviews and conversations are accessible through the same landscape or portrait links, or directly through the bold blue titles below, and they comprise live and unscripted samples of authentic speech. YouTube subtitles are available through the Closed Caption (CC) button, and viewers on a laptop or desktop computer should also be able to get these auto-translated into the language of their choice through the Settings Wheel. Every film (except the first short introduction and the 3-way English discussion) is also accompanied by a Clilstore transcript. Links to rough written English translations are also available via the video description and reproduced below. In some cases where reference is made to related postgraduate study, links are also given to participants’ own papers from the time to give a sense of contemporary research and debate about then dominant issues from a practitioner perspective.
The opening conversational clip quickly introduces the three former members of Birmingham Industrial Language Training Services featured in the documentary, as they speak Punjabi or Hindi to briefly outline their ILT experience and say where it eventually led them. Subtitles in both these languages are available, including for auto-translation if necessary.
Speaking in Urdu at some length, Nazir ul Haq, last leader of the Birmingham ILT team of the mid-1980s before its absorption into the college, offers memories and reflections – judiciously supplemented with quotations from well-known Urdu poets – on the work of the local unit, as well as the national service, during that time. This clip is an amalgamation of a series of short recordings that Nazir made over a number of days, as detailed with links below, in which, alongside critical analysis, he also creates a humane picture of the team’s mission and working ethos, with poignant reminiscences and tributes to those no longer with us.
00:09 Introduction
02:04 ILT 1980s role
06:16 Memory and reminiscence
09:53 Personal journey
14:57 Equal Opportunities: appreciation of colleagues and contributions
19:35 Summary critique of ILT approach to racism awareness and anti-racism
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
Nazir also mentions his PhD-level postgraduate studies at Birmingham University during the same period, and his continuing association with the university after the closure of ILT. For an example of his work in the area of diaspora formation with specific reference to the Kashmiri community you can read his paper presented some years later at a conference in Budapest: Diaspora Formation and Ethnic National Mobilisation of Kashmiris in Britain: A Reflective Case Study.
Speaking Punjabi, Sardul Dhesi, retired Deputy Principal of South and City College Birmingham, gives a summary account of his 48-year Further Education career in the city, including his time with Birmingham ILT in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His time with ILT was a seminal period for him, including a one-year secondment to get a Master’s degree in Race and Education, from which he never looked back. Also important to him were his trade union links, with particular regard to equality initiatives. Over his long subsequent career, he occupied increasingly senior positions in what has become the biggest college in the West Midlands.
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
For more specific detail on Sardul’s work on and research into Trade Union links to ILT you can read his essay on Trade Unions and Racial Inequalities: An examination of the role of ILTS in removing the barriers, written as part of his M.Soc.Sc course at Birmingham University during his 1985-86 secondment, together with the appendix containing a selection of contemporary ILT and TUC materials.
Speaking Hindi, Harmesh Manghra, retired Inspector of Education, recounts the various stages of his career in some detail, including his time with Birmingham ILT in the early 1980s. He starts with the multilingual education he received in India before arriving in the UK, when job opportunities were initially limited despite his qualifications. But his time with ILT provided a springboard into a varied and stimulating career across various educational sectors. Even in retirement he remains committed to easing newcomers’ passage through educational opportunities.
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
Speaking Gaelic, Gordon Wells, researcher with the CIALL project, outlines his career path, including his time with Birmingham ILT in the 1980s and what he learned from that experience for use in later years, including with Island Voices. It was the rising interest in “Mother Tongue” maintenance that inspired him to start learning Gaelic, and his experience working on the BBC’s “Hindi Urdu Bol Chaal” series that developed his interest in recording speech in particular. This was reinforced by the ILT emphasis on close community connection with the day-to-day concerns of working people.
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
Gordon’s research topic for his 1987 dissertation for the MSc in Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University, while on secondment from ILT, was on Concepts of “Mother Tongue” and “Native Speaker” in Relation to the Teaching of Languages to Adults. This paper, later cited in Professor Alan Davies’ 1991 book “The Native Speaker in Applied Linguistics”, anticipated by some years a now longstanding debate on the question of “native” vis-à-vis “non-native” English speaking teachers.
Suman Watts came into ILT from a broadcasting background on local radio. She briefly explains in Hindi that she put these skills to good use in helping prepare audio-visual teaching materials. In her later career she helped not only English learners, but also learners of community languages like Hindi and Urdu, within the context of the issues and principles that informed the ILT ethos.
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
Speaking Bangla, Muhammad Idrish, who worked at the neighbouring Asian Resource Centre in the 1980s, offers succinct memories of friends and colleagues in the Birmingham Industrial Language Training team (as well as the Dudley team), and their contribution to the anti-racism movement in the community, including the NALGO-supported nationwide Muhammad Idrish Defence Campaign.
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
Harmesh Manghra and Sardul Dhesi
In this longer conversational extract Harmesh and Sardul, speaking Punjabi, recall shifts in focus of the ILT service at national and regional levels from language teaching, through cultural and racism awareness training, to structural analysis of social problems. Their career development paths took them on to West Midlands-wide initiatives with an emphasis on greater community engagement by colleges, opening local centres and providing appropriate facilities. Statistics now show far greater proportions of Black and Asian staff and students engaged in Further Education.
Wordlinked transcript (Clilstore unit)
Written translation (online PDF)
Harmesh Manghra, Sardul Dhesi, and Gordon Wells
This is an extended three-way conversation in English between Sardul, Harmesh, and Gordon about the ILT legacy, with a particular focus on language support in relation to both ESOL and Community Languages:
00:06 First reminiscences and appreciations
The three recall how ILT launched them into their professional careers under the guidance of Clarice Brierley, then leader of a dynamic team.
04:12 Bilingualism, ESOL, and Community Languages
Harmesh and Sardul were among the first bilingual ESOL teachers whose skills in other languages were recognised and increasingly valued, when Mother Tongue maintenance was also beginning to be raised as an issue, and NATESLA changed its name to NATECLA and established a national base in the college.
10:05 Materials development
The local authority’s supportive approach to staff development was instrumental in enabling team members to develop new skills and ideas, including Gordon’s role in the innovative BBC Hindi Urdu Bol Chaal project.
13:12 Community context
The ILT approach to ESOL and Community Languages was strong on addressing language learning in the grounded reality of the learners’ own situation, so community linkage was essential. The team members discuss how this guiding principle can be equally applied in other language contexts, for example with Gaelic in Scotland or many endangered languages in India.
16:05 Confidence issues
Team members share stories from personal or family experience of assimilative social pressures to suppress mother tongue use – whether Punjabi or Gaelic – and a Punjabi summer school initiative in the college is noted.
19:28 Final reflections
Lastly, each member reinforces the learning and confidence-building benefits of their early involvement in ILT, whether in relation to language skills and use, subsequent career paths, or social justice concerns, noting also how some issues first tackled 40 years ago, for example around workplace learning, remain prevalent today.
Linguistic Diversity
In conclusion, we may note that the year 1984 is now further back in the past than it was then still in the future when the dying George Orwell was putting the final touches to his doom-laden “Nineteen Eighty-Four” novel in a writer’s hideaway on the Hebridean Isle of Jura. Central to the workings of the totalitarian society he was predicting was “Newspeak” – a reduced and distorted officially approved form of language with a simplified grammar and reduced vocabulary, intended to promote social conformism and inhibit critical thinking.
This project is a new contribution from those we might now literally call “Old Speakers”(!), which looks back at the linguistic reality of the actual 1984 of urban England through the eyes of ILT staff and associates who were there at the time, with the benefit of their now 40 years of hindsight. If Orwell could have come back to visit us in the 1984 of real history he might well have been first shocked, then perhaps relieved on reflection, to find ample evidence of significantly increased linguistic diversity compared to the England he knew, at least at grassroots community level. It’s a confounding contrast, rooted in lived community reality, to the uniform and restrictive Newspeak monolingualism against which he had imaginatively warned.
We are deeply indebted to all the contributors who have made this collection possible. In addition to those appearing onscreen, we must also note particularly the crucial assistance of Professor Udaya Narayana Singh, a longterm partner in Mediating Multilingualism, in co-ordinating the South Asian language translation and transcription work with his team of collaborators. In a previous “Talking Points with Norman Maclean” contribution he references the concept of “jugaaR” to illustrate a South Asian propensity for inclusive linguistic accommodation. And in a more recent lecture for Bhasha Mela he similarly contrasts the Orwellian vision of 1984 with the historical facts of interlingual coexistence in South Asia, thus providing an alternative optimistic vision and rationale for maintaining cultural diversity. With that in mind, we also thank and salute Audrey West, another of our Talking Points collaborators and Extensions pioneers, for her continuing determined local promotion of the Jamaican language. We are also delighted that Magaidh Smith consented to take part in true vernacular Gaelic style, and we welcome the fresh Welsh voice of long-settled Grimsay resident, Rhodri Evans. In the face of encroaching Anglophone monoculture, every similar contribution underlines the value of ongoing linguistic diversity.
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