Hugh Cory who was John’s office mate at Eastern Mediterrean University for over a year back in the nineties, and who Nilgun also remembers fondly from those years, sadly died late last year. There’s a tribute to Hugh in the latest Humanising Language Teaching journal, including contributions from John, and many others who worked with Hugh over his long and colourful career.
In those days (John adds), Hugh and I spent a considerable amount of time considering how to integrate a greater emphasis on teaching and learning into the DOTE training programme we were then running. It was not long after Michael Lewis had published The Lexical Approach, a book we absolutely adored for its straight-talking, firing-from-the-hip approach, and the riches it provided us with in terms of quotable discussion points for teacher training. Before he left, Hugh bought me a copy of Michael Lewis’s follow-up, and we went our separate ways, largely. We did have one drunken reunion in Edinburgh – but that’s another story. Suffice it to say here, those early DOTE training sessions led to a lot of creative exploration of the potential of lexical approaches, and it’s appropriate to thank and credit Hugh for his inspiration on these pages. Too soon gone, Hugh.
