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Keith Marshall will be well known to many in
the Modern Languages community, as a lecturer
in French at the University of Wales, Bangor,
and through his involvement with CILT Cymru.
Now retired from higher education, we asked
Keith to reflect on his career and many years of
working in modern languages.
Keith Marshall was educated in
Scotland at Morrison’s
Academy Crieff and St
Andrews University, and spent
most of his working life at the
University of Wales, Bangor. He served
as a lecturer in French from 1970 to
2005, and as the Coordinator of
Languages for Non-Specialists from
1995 to 2005. From 1990 to 1993 he
was seconded to direct an Enterprise
in Higher Education Programme. He is
also known for his work at CILT
Cymru, where he was Director from
2002 to 2004 and Assistant Director
for Higher Education from 2004 to
2007.
So what attracted you to modern
languages
No blinding road-to-Damascus
experience. In the early years of
secondary school I was better at
French than any other subject,
passable at Latin and rotten at
Sciences and Maths.The school
allowed me to drop Science and take
up German at about age 14.
Family circumstances also played a
part. My father was killed before I was
born in World War II, and my paternal
grandfather made friends in France
where his only son was buried.To his
credit, rather than being bitter and
hostile towards Germans, he
supported efforts to build peaceful
understanding between all nations. In
this spirit and to improve my
languages, he arranged for me to
spend summer holidays with families in
France and Germany.They opened my
mind, and by age 18 I loved French
and German language and culture.
Going to university to study languages
was a natural progression. At St
Andrews, by good luck, my personal
tutor was Professor Sam Taylor. He not
only helped me out when I
misbehaved, but drew me into the
French 18th century Enlightenment
and inspired me to carry on with it at
postgraduate level. It has been at the
heart of my professional life ever since.
The last course I taught was on
Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses, to
which I was still adding refinements -
and to the best group of students I
had ever had.
What are the major changes that you
have observed in language teaching in
Higher Education (HE) and other
sectors in the course of your career
What do you think has been the
greatest challenge that the discipline
has faced in past or recent years
Decline in numbers
The biggest change has to be the
decline in the numbers of students
doing languages.
In Bangor, a temporary dip affected
French in the early 1980s.The serious
decline, however, began across the UK
in the mid-1990s and affected an
increasing number of Higher Education
Institutions (HEIs) until 2005.The
educational roots of this were in the
schools, where the number of Modern
Foreign Languages (MFL) A-levels
began to fall after 1994 (49,920) and
continued till 2005 (33,894).This was
uneven geographically and socially, with
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