The Real Herbert Puchta

So who is this Austrian professor of English with a long-standing devotion to English and the English learner?

In his own words, Herbert Puchta gives us an insight into his long love affair with the English language – and with helping others fall in love with learning it.

Why did you decide to make English language teaching and writing your career?

I’m fascinated with language, I’m fascinated with communication, and I’m fascinated with people. Becoming a language teacher seemed to be the ideal platform for bringing all three together.

What first attracted you to the English language?

When I first became aware of it I was 10, in my first year at an Austrian grammar school. I was fascinated – by the sounds and the secrets of meaning that more and more began to unfold. When I became able to read books in English I devoured them.

The ability to communicate came much later – in those days a language classroom was far from communication! The only English I ever heard was my teacher’s; the classroom was a place to translate, and to manipulate grammar sentences – the teaching methodology at that time followed the tradition of instruction in Latin. For me, communication came later, through contact with native speakers of English, and that increased my fascination with the language.

What do you remember about your own experiences of learning English as a child? How did they inspire you to want to help others learn the language?

I grew up in Austria, so my first language is German. In those days there was no foreign language education at primary level, and I started at the age of ten. I believe I was what psychologists would call ‘intrinsically motivated’. I loved the language. I adored my teacher. I hung on her lips from the first to the last minute of the lessons, and I devoured with delight every bit of the English language I could get hold of. I knew from deep within myself, for me, this is more than a subject. It’s my life, my everything!

One day I was waiting for the school bus when suddenly, I couldn’t believe what I saw. A coach full of tourists arrived. The coach had a GB number plate on its back! I immediately knew this was my big moment. I had learnt English for half a year, and I loved it, and had excellent results on my tests, and I would now use what I had learnt. So I went up to the coach. The door opened and an elderly gentleman appeared. I plucked up my courage, went up to him, stopped, thought for a while, and then I pointed at my glasses and said, “Glasses!” You can probably imagine the kind of bewildered look I got.

I was embarrassed, and I began to ask myself some very serious questions regarding the quality of my foreign language education, and some nagging doubts arose as to whether my teacher really knew what she was doing with us in the lessons, as the ten-year-old who happened to be me failed completely when he tried to communicate with the ‘language’ he had learnt so eagerly. “Glasses” was a surrogate language exponent of saying something like, “Hi! I’m learning English. And I’d love to try it out and talk to you!” It was a compensation for not being able to say, “Look at me! I’ve only been learning English for six months, but I know quite a bit already. I even know the word for… glasses!”

What are the special requirements of children learning English?

Children are children everywhere, and they are all fascinated by things foreign to them. They want to explore those things, and children are natural foreign language learners. If we know how to teach them we can help them to become successful users of foreign languages.

One key point for an author is to know what makes the students of a particular target group tick. A few examples: the primary class is about appealing to students’ imagination through stories that offer strong and clear emotional contrasts – good and bad, happy and sad, rich and poor, and through content in which there are no clear borderlines between reality and fiction. A characteristic feature of the more advanced classroom, in contrast, is that its students gradually begin to (want to) understand how the world works. They develop an interest in theories, and content areas such as psychology, history and sociology are becoming important to them. Then students at intermediate level are in between. They can be highly mature at one moment, and real babies the next. The secret there is to create a balance of imaginative and real world content, with the real world focus becoming stronger and stronger the older and more mature the students become.

Why is an understanding of children’s cognitive processes important for learning a language?

A world-class football coach does not deal only with developing the optimum strategies and techniques. He will also aim to learn as much as possible about the way the human body works; the human body is essential for anybody who wants to play football. The human mind is as important for foreign language learning as is the body for playing football!

Why does your approach work so well across so many different European countries?

The reasons I believe are:

First, people from different countries and nations may have different cultural traditions, but beyond that people are people, teens are teens, and children are children. In other words, there is a solid foundation of common interest across cultures that a course book writer can and needs to build on if he wants to appeal to an international target audience.

Secondly, young people are fascinated with learning about other cultures. This is why in my course books I show how young people in other countries and cultures live. This has two advantages: students learn more about other countries and the people living there, they begin to understand others and “otherness”, and develop more tolerance and cultural understanding. It also helps to encourage students to use what they are learning about young people growing up under different cultural traditions to reflect on their own way of growing up. They increase their awareness of themselves at the same time as learning about others.

What are your views on European education systems? What are its strengths and weaknesses and, in your view, where is it headed in the future?

Its strength is its teachers; many of them are extremely dedicated, and constantly want to improve their work.

Weaknesses? I think we are faced with one big challenge in Europe at the moment. Politicians will all agree that language learning is extremely important, that every European should be able to communicate in at least two foreign languages, and that learning languages is about increasing one’s awareness of cultural differences and is therefore an important political objective for the European Union.

However, we live in tough times economically, and it has become noticeable in many countries that less and less money is spent on education. Consequently, we can see a reduction in the number of hours of English taught at school, and a lowering of the standards in teacher education. A very dramatic situation! What we need is classes that are not too big, better teacher training, and classrooms with modern technology.

The children of today are the grown-ups of tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be good for the development of the world if tomorrow’s grown-ups all had an excellent command of at least one foreign language? Being able to communicate in a foreign language really well will maximise the chances of people understanding each other better, and so should make a valuable contribution to empathy and peace worldwide.

What is your opinion of your success across Europe? Has it surprised you? What are the highlights of your 30-year career in helping others conquer English?

People sometimes ask me how I planned my career, and I can only say that I never had any plan to become what I now am. It just happened. My main interest has been from the very beginning to improve the quality of teaching, and that is what has been the driving force behind the success of my books.

The highlights? Many, really – whenever I talk to teachers who say that my books make a difference to their students’ learning, or when I talk to a student and I notice their enthusiasm. As a teenager in Ecuador said about one of my coursebooks: “I love your book. It makes me think.”