Jeremy Harmer

“Even before I got to know him personally, Jeremy was a key influence on my thinking about teaching and learning – primarily due to his role in popularising communicative language teaching in the 1980s. Through his books like The Practice of English Teaching (the first edition of which was published in 1983), he introduced a generation of teachers, not just to CLT, but to other – equally innovative – approaches, including humanistic language teaching. Jeremy was never a ‘signed-up’ humanistic practitioner in any doctrinaire sense, but re-reading his take on humanism in the 1991 edition of the book, I am again in awe of his capacity to capture the essence of the movement in a fair and balanced way, without any of the cheap shots (‘touchy-feeliness’!) which characterised my own, less measured, outbursts at the time (blush!). In an email exchange a few years back, in preparation for a talk I was giving, I asked him if he felt he had ‘an agenda’ when he wrote his methodology texts. His answer: ‘Rather boringly, I try not to be seduced by any particular position and my absolute certainties about what we do tend to fluctuate (although core beliefs remain the same I think).’ I would hazard that those core beliefs share a lot with humanism, because, au fond, Jeremy is a humanist, in the small-h sense, and everything he says and writes about teaching is infused with a genuine love of people, and of language learning as a form of self-realisation.”