Mira: Hello, Patricia. Today is 7th February. First of all, big thanks for agreeing to be my interviewee today. So, this is a very spontaneous conversation. As I told you, we as a small team, have decided to collect some data on ELT history or English Language Teaching History in Macedonia. I would be really interested in hearing how the whole story started for you, how you got into English Language Teaching.
Patricia: Well, I studied French at the University of Bristol and, when I graduated in 1971, I knew one thing, and that was that I didn’t want to be a teacher of French because I loved everything French, and the idea of school kids murdering the French language was just terrible to me because all English children have terrible accents, and it’s very difficult to teach them French! I decided that I definitely didn’t want to be a French teacher, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Then, that summer, I saw in the newspaper, there was a British Council advertisement in The Guardian for English language teachers for Finnish-British societies in Finland. And, I thought, oh, well, the only thing I knew I wanted to do, was to travel. So, I thought, why not Finland? Nobody’s ever been to Finland. That would be a great place to go. So, I managed to get one of the jobs. I was interviewed, and I got a job in a small place which was based around a paper mill, a factory for making paper. I started taking conversation classes. I had small classes for the top directors, but also for workers, engineers, but also their families, and it was great. I loved it. I thought, wow, you know, this is the way to go. I know the language, English. I know when it’s right. I know when it’s wrong. So, I don’t have to study it and work that out. Of course, I had to learn a bit of linguistics so I could talk about the grammar and everything, but I really enjoyed that and then I thought, I can travel the world, which is what I wanted to do. Then the following year, I got a place on a DipEd course, to get a diploma in education, so you can become a teacher with the specialty of teaching English as a foreign language, or a second language. And when I finished that, I was going to go abroad.
But then politics intervened, because a man called Idi Amin - you will never have heard of him - this is 1973 - he became the dictator of Uganda, and he threw out all the Asians who worked in Uganda. It had been a British colony, and they had brought in a lot of people from the Indian subcontinent, especially to be merchants, lawyers, doctors; they were the middle class in Uganda, and Idi Amin really resented them, and expelled them. And many of them came to Britain. I felt very sorry for these people. And so, I thought, well, I can go and help. So, the autumn after I’d got my diploma, I went to teach a secondary school in London. I had all these Ugandan boys and girls who were very middle class, and very sweet, but they didn’t speak very good English; it was actually rather sad. Anyway, I won’t go into that, because I still had itchy feet, as they say, and I wanted to go abroad again. So, I looked again in the paper, and they were advertising jobs in Yugoslavia, as it was then. And they wanted nine people, actually, because there was one for each Republic and each pokraina, and two for Croatia. So they interviewed me, and I was very lucky. I got the job in Skopje, and that was how I came to Skopje as a teacher of English through the British Council at the beginning. After five years, of course, I was employed by the University itself, but at the beginning, I was a British Council lektor, like Graham Reid had been before me, and Peggy Reid.
Mira: So, you started teaching at the Faculty of Philology. When was it? Approximately, which year was that appointment at the English department?
Patricia: That was 1974. And when I arrived, the new building, which I think is still the building, the Filološki Fakultet, wasn’t ready and the old building had either been demolished or, anyway, wasn’t being used. So, I had a few weeks when I wasn’t doing anything. And, my colleagues, especially Dragi Mihajlovski and Ljupčo Stefanovski, very kindly took me around and showed me Skopje. And we had a great time. So it was a strange beginning. When I did begin, I was replacing Graham, basically, because there had been two lektors and now there was only one. I was basically doing what Graham had been doing, which was…he was actually helping Professor Brkić, who was teaching English literature. This meant that a lot of my job at the beginning was actually taking Shakespeare plays and looking at them from a linguistic point of view with the students, to help them in their literary studies. And that went on for a couple of years until Goran came to the University as Prof. Brkić’s assistant. And he obviously specialised in Shakespeare so he could take that on. But what I was also doing was translation, using texts which Graham had found, which were all literary texts. So, at the beginning, it was a very literature-based course, actually; we were basically helping the students to understand the literature, you know, from the linguistic point of view.
Mira: Do you remember how big the groups were, how many students you had, in the 70s, mid 70s?
Patricia: Well, it seems to me that they were quite big. I mean, there must have been 20, 25 students in the classroom.
Mira: I understood from Violeta Swanson and Mirka Mishikj that there were only two, three, four people who really spoke some English and were good at it because they had the chance, right. Violeta also got married to a foreigner whose first language was English. Mirka was also lucky with the chance to go abroad and also to work as a translator, and Olga, her sister, who was very ambitious and persistent, helped her, in a way, with some materials. So, yeah, it was, they said really hard even to find teachers for high schools, like Korčagin or Josip Broz Tito because there were 2 or 3 people who really spoke English well. French was dominant, German and Russian. So, do you remember how English took over slowly or became more popular, or how high schools maybe decided or private language schools decided to offer English? I’ve only read about this, but I haven’t found good data really about the expansion. And I know that the British Council did great work and they really invested a lot in the spread of English, but I don’t have any information on how it was in schools and at the University per se.
Patricia: Well, there was also the American Center. There was an American lektor every year. When I first came, it was Charles Wukasch in my year. He actually went to Priština later. He was Sorbian, in fact, of Sorbian descent. I’d never heard of Sorbia before, only Serbia, but that’s who he was. So, the American Center sent a lektor and the British Council, and the British Council were, as you say, very active. Quite quickly, I think as soon as Goran came to the University - which I think was after a couple of years '76, '77, I can’t remember - I could focus more on the language and work with Professor Siljanoski. Did you ever meet Velko Siljanoski?
Mira: No, no.
Patricia: He spoke wonderful English. He taught phonetics. And, as soon as I started speaking to him, he said, your As are a bit flat, but otherwise you’ve got a good accent. It was funny. And, somebody who came to study history, who I got to know very well, Feroze Yasamee, - he later became Professor of Oriental History at the University of Manchester, which meant Eastern Europe as well - he met a student of ours on the train on his way to Skopje, and he said, she was talking about her teacher, Pat Marsh, and, he thought, well, this Pat Marsh must be very posh, you know, a very upper-class English speaker because the student had such an upper-class accent. And then when Feroze met me, he said, well you’re not so posh, it must be somebody else, and I said, yes, it’s Velko. It seemed to us very funny that in a socialist state, everybody was learning a very, very upper-class English accent from Velko Siljanoski. He was wonderful. He had a fantastic ear for the language, but he spoke like the Queen. So, although I speak RP, you know, Received Pronunciation, his was even more ‘Received’. But, anyway, with Professor Siljanoski and, I think with Mirka Mishikj as well. Well, I’m pretty sure that she was involved. What we did was, we sat down together and we created, you know, a nastavna programa for language teaching for the lektors.
Mira: Right.
Patricia: So we based it on linguistic issues - syntax, semantics, lexicology, pragmatics. We made a programme for each year, which could be examined at the end of the year. In the exam, we would make sure the first-year students knew certain structures, you know, and could use them and the same for the second year, and the third year, and the fourth year until we got to far more complicated structures by the end. That’s what we decided we needed, of course, to have a teaching programme, a curriculum for the language, just as they had for the literature course. So, that’s what we did with Velko and I think Mirka, yes. Certainly, we developed it with Mirka.
Mira: Yeah. As Mirka told me, actually, Olga Tomikj came and she said, you cannot do this as improvisation because in Belgrade they had a very clear programme and syllabus. And in a way, she pushed you guys that you need to sit down and Olga helped you. That is what Mirka said, that she remembers. Olga, in a way, pushed you, and as she was ambitious, she transferred her experiences from Belgrade, from Serbia back then.
Patricia: Yes, I’m sure. I’m sure Olga helped us. Yes.
Mira: She helped somehow, and yeah, you decided which teaching structures to be taught in which year. Was Natka Gogova there when you came here?
Patricia: Not then, no. She was at the Centre for Foreign Languages. She and Violeta were my teachers of Macedonian because I was very lucky that, the year I arrived, there were some exchange students from Chico, California, one of whom was, of course, Jack Swanson, who married Violeta. And so we, I and these students from Chico, California, had Macedonian classes at the Centre for Foreign Languages, and our teachers were Violeta Derebanova and Natka Gogova. I became very good friends with both of them very early on. And, still to this day, they’re my best friends. It was wonderful to study Macedonian with them. And I don’t think Natka wanted to come as a lektor for a long time. I think I persuaded her, actually, I seem to remember.
Mira: She will be my last interviewee next week.
Patricia: But I know that we were looking for a lektor, and I’m pretty sure that I said to her, why don’t you come Natka? Obviously I knew she spoke very good English, just as Violeta did, and all the rest of them at the Centre for Foreign Languages.
Mira: Did you borrow any practices from the UK or the context was completely different, so you couldn’t borrow readymade foreign language study programmes or syllabi?
Patricia: Well, I think indirectly. What I did certainly was, because the materials we used were mainly Cambridge Proficiency books, you know, books that were intended for people doing Cambridge exams. So I took a lot of the practice of structures from there to put into the different curricula for each year. I bought those books and then we just photocopied them for each class that we did. There was a wonderful man, Vlastimir, who would do the photocopies, and he always complained how many I wanted, but we became friends in the end, and I used to buy him a coffee for doing all the photocopies for me.
Mira: Any other materials that you used back then like “cassettes”, maybe videos?
Patricia: Yes, there were cassettes for the Cambridge books. I can’t remember what they were called, though.
Mira: Because I’m curious how people practised listening, their listening skills.
Patricia: There were those cassettes with them. What did we do as well? I recorded sometimes from the radio programmes and things like that on the BBC World Service. Obviously, for the final year students and people like that. But, yes, I think I seem to remember trying to record things, different things for them to listen to, but the main materials were Cambridge courses that we used with tapes and books.
Mira: Okay so tapes were included, interesting. What about grammar books? I believe Thompson and Martinet was an important grammar book. We still used that when I enrolled.
Patricia: Yes.
Mira:…as a freshman, yeah. Marija Janeva was my grammar teacher, and that is how we started with Thompson and Martinet.
Patricia: Yeah. I think in the first year that was used in the lectures, but in the lektors’ classes, we tended to do exercises to practise the grammar they’d been learning in … What was it called? In the first year. Voved vo Gramatikata?
Mira: They called it Morphology, and then Phonetics in year two, then Lexicology and Lexicography in year three, and Syntax in year four.
Patricia: That’s right, yes. So, we coordinated with the lecturers. It was Darinka Arsova in the first year when I first came.
Mira: This is interesting, as well. Who else was involved? Who do you remember? Darinka Arsova?
Patricia: She was doing the first year Morphology and then Marija Janeva took over, and then Velko was always for Phonetics. And, when he sadly died young, Marija took over. I remember her crying. She said “I can’t do Phonetics; I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to teach Phonetics!” But she did it. And of course, she did it very well. She did everything well. But I remember her taking over Phonetics when Velko died. And Lexicology was Ljupčo Stefanovski, most of the time that I was there, and Olga Tomić, Mirka’s elder sister, of course taught Syntax. And then Ljupčo took that over when she left. And of course, Vlado…
Mira: Vladimir Cvetkovski, the History of English, right.
Patricia: He taught the History of the English Language. So, that was all the people on the language side.
Mira: Do you remember if anybody came to evaluate the programmes? Because Violeta remembers some guy either from like Denmark, she wasn’t sure, she said, ask Patricia if she knows that, someone from Denmark or Holland, who came to evaluate the programme and was impressed. He attended classes at the Department.
Patricia: Oh, I don’t remember that.
Mira: She just remembers some foreign expert, who was in Belgrade back then, but came to Macedonia. He needed to evaluate the work at the Department, and I don’t know who he reported to or who he wrote the evaluation report for, so Violeta was missing some information, but she clearly remembered how he behaved, how much he loved the atmosphere, and what happened during the class, she remembers all that, but she couldn’t remember the name.
Patricia: No. In my time, it was Patrick Early. He was the English Language Officer at the British Council, and he was a wonderful man. He visited all the lektors all over Yugoslavia.
Mira: Who was this?
Patricia: His name was Patrick Early, and he was the English Language Officer. He would visit all the different lektors in all the different republics and pokraini, and I think what he was doing was getting us all to compete with each other because he would come and say to me, oh, you know, John in Niš is doing this to teach whatever it was, you know, and then and I say, oh, yes, that’s a great idea. And then he would go to somebody else and say, oh, you know, Pat in Skopje, she’s doing this. So, he sort of spread best practice among all of us, I remember. And the great thing was that he started these conferences. The British Council paid for English language conferences every year, and we rotated around the universities in Yugoslavia as it was then.
Mira: Was this in December, because Mirka was telling me about some conferences in December at the end of each year?
Patricia: I think it was December, yes.
Mira: Aha. Okay.
Patricia: And they were paid for by the British Council, but they were organised by the University, the English Department at the University, wherever it was that year. So obviously we had ours in Ohrid, and it was a great conference, I remember - all of them were great. And it wasn’t just for British Council lektors, it was for all lektors, you know, Yugoslavs as well. So, I got to know Yugoslavs who were English language lektors, in Zagreb, in Belgrade, in Priština and all over the place. It was lovely. It was such a wonderful atmosphere. And we also had professional development, as well as all talking about teaching different aspects of the English language. I’ll never forget Mirka’s contribution in Ohrid. She did a course in teaching oro to everybody. And there was one Englishman who, as we say in English, had two left feet, in other words, completely hopeless at dancing, no sense of rhythm or anything else. And she managed to teach him to dance. I remember his face when we did our final performance for the others. He was just beaming, he could dance now, because she was such a great teacher, Mirka. And I remember professional development in another place. I did some poetry, how to write poetry. And that was just wonderful because it showed you that, yes, anybody can write poetry. It was really good. Those professional development classes really did teach you a lot about yourself, you know, and how you can do things that you perhaps think you can’t.
Mira: This is excellent, something that is missing. The British Council organised a lot of professional development courses, but they closed, and now teachers are really left on their own. Okay. With the American lektors, or those who came every year, how did you collaborate or what did they do? It is not clear to me what they taught basically.
Patricia: That’s interesting.
Mira: Did they also teach lektors’ classes or they came to teach literature?
Patricia: We always had an American Literature Professor. We also had a lektor. But I’m not sure what they taught - we certainly didn’t collaborate on what we were doing.
Mira: Everybody mentions you, Graham and Peggy, of course. Nobody mentioned the American lectors. Nobody remembers them.
Patricia: Oh, there were some great ones. I remember Suzanne, I can’t remember her surname. She was good.
Mira: Did they change every ten months? Every year? Maybe that’s why. Nobody stayed for a longer period like you, Graham and Peggy.
Patricia: You’re right. Most of them left after a year. But, yes, it’s a very good question what they were doing because I don’t think they took part in the curriculum. We didn’t say to them, you know, you cover this and we’ll cover that. I’m not sure what they did at all. That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about this before.
Mira: You don’t remember socialising with them, that’s the funny part because all of you worked on translation, exchanging books, having discussions about literature, but nobody remembers how these people participated in even the social life of the Department.
Patricia: I used to associate with them, obviously. But you’re right, they didn’t take much part in the activities of the Department. One of them was very friendly with Ilinka Grubović. I think she taught Morphology after Darinka before Marija. I’m pretty sure. So, I think she was particularly friendly with one of them, but I can’t remember who. But you’re quite right. The Department didn’t associate so much with them. Obviously, because I was married to a Macedonian, I spoke Macedonian and, of course, I was teaching translation, so I had a lot more to do with my colleagues. I mean, all my friends were in the Department, so, it was a bit different, I suppose, because I was part of the community.
Mira: Could you tell me a little bit more about the whole translation process, what you worked on? Was it important to translate as we call them classic works by Marko Cepenkov or you were more into poetry, modern poetry? Also, you mentioned the Macedonian Review as a place or venue where translations were published. So, could you reflect a little bit on that?
Patricia: As I said, when I first arrived, Graham had made a very good selection of many texts for translation, and they were all from Macedonian literature. I think they were all prose. But when we started to create the curriculum, I thought we needed to expand the materials we were asking students to translate, because what I was being asked to translate was, of course, not literature. It was very often, well, it could be anything, you know. A psychologist would ask me to translate a paper that they’d written, or I might need to translate instructions for a mechanic. You know, there were all kinds of things that needed translating into English, and there were very few people who could translate. So, I was translating everything and anything. And so I started to say, well, when people graduate, they won’t be translating literature. They’ll have to be translating all kinds of things. So, we should give students the opportunity to see texts from all kinds of fields of study which they might encounter. I remember I took things from the newspaper, and more technical language once from a medical journal. We talked about the importance of having key vocabulary for the field in which you were translating, knowing the correct terminology.
Of course, the English is always English, so you just slot words into the structures. Especially if you were interpreting for a conference, for example, you needed to have a list of vocabulary that would come up because, obviously, you can’t be expected to know the specialist terminology. There was a psychology conference I remember, which I was asked to translate at, and there was discussion of the diagnosis of different problems. So I asked for the appropriate terminology and they gave it to me. Every time we had a conference, we would ask for key vocabulary to be given to us beforehand, and that was very important. I think, my contribution to the translation course was definitely to think about what people might eventually be translating because, as I said, most people are not going to be translating literature, but they may well join a company where they need to translate all kinds of technical stuff. I remember there was a bit of resistance to that in the Department. You know, people were saying, well, you know, is this good English? It’s not good Macedonian. And I would say, but this is realistically what we need to prepare students for. If something is badly written, of course, you can make it better. That was accepted. And in the end, as I said, we would translate all kinds of texts. I think that did help to prepare students for the outside world.
Mira: What about the works that Graham selected - you said he selected some important works?
Patricia: That was Macedonian prose. It was mainly Živko Čingo or Petre Andreevski, or Gane Todorovski: the novelists, the writers, the prose writers. And then, of course, we translated Racin and T’ga za Jug and so on.
Mira: Blaže Koneski?
Patricia:I translated some Blaže Koneski, but prose, not the poetry.
Mira: Okay.
Patricia: But I mainly translated Goran Stefanovski’s plays and other plays.
Mira: Apparently you didn’t need to go abroad to learn the language because you’re a native speaker of English. But do you remember this whole concept of Macedonians having the only opportunity to work as Mother’s help, or Au pairs and how much they progressed in terms of speaking skills, comprehension skills, listening skills, because both Mirka and Violeta mentioned that it was very important that they had the chance to work for intellectuals. You know, they went to families that were well-educated who even helped them with attending some courses and always helped them with the language. They really wanted Mirka and Violeta to make fast progress to get more educated, not to be burdened with everyday vocabulary of what you needed, what you were going to cook today. No, they even encouraged them to go to the theatre, to go to cinemas, which is excellent, to buy books, they would discuss books, read together. So, do you remember anything about this, for example, Mirka before she left and after she came back or Violeta? How much progress they made?
Patricia: I think I met them both after they had been to England, and they were still very friendly with their host families. Ljubica Arsovska of Kulturen život and The Macedonian Review, as well. She had the same experience and she was still visiting, you know, the people that she’d been working for, and they became great friends. So, it was a really great system. I had the same thing. I went to Paris to learn French, as an au pair, and it was a wonderful experience. I went to classes at the Alliance Française and so on. It was a great system, that au pair system. I don’t think it exists so much now.
Mira: There are Work and Travel programmes, but it’s not about au pairing, it’s more about working at cafeterias, resorts, some restaurants.
Patricia: Goran worked in a restaurant in London. That was how he learnt to perfect his English. I’ll never forget he was always talking about a Greek colleague he had, who would come and say “Two shoup” meaning “Two soups”. Some very funny stories he had of that time working in a London restaurant on the Kennington Road. Oh, I even remember that! It’s amazing how your memory for things many, many years ago is far better than for what you did yesterday.
Mira: Those were the best years, I believe. That’s how it is with me, what I liked the best I really remember every single detail. In elementary and high school, I do remember a lot compared to other friends that I have. They don’t remember anything from high school, it was because you were not interested probably, in many of these issues covered even classes.
Patricia: I was thinking what you said about TV. I did a series of TV programmes and many of them were based on songs. My brother-in-law, Vlatko Stefanovski, accompanied me on the guitar when I was singing in those programmes. He found one a few years ago and he sent it to me.
Mira: Can you send me a link to that programme, or do you have it?
Patricia: I think I have, yes. Vlatko certainly found one of them, and he sent it to me. I’ll send you a link.
Mira: What did you do in those TV shows? Did you retell stories? Did you read? What did you do? What was your role?
Patricia: I would have a theme and deliberately use words, teach words which were going to come up in a song or a sketch. I remember there was a Simon & Garfunkel song, “April Come She Will”. It goes through the year, about how a love affair starts in April and ends in August. It was great for vocabulary. I taught the vocabulary and then sang the song with Vlatko.
Mira: This was amazing. So, this was for Macedonian Television?
Patricia: Yes, yes.
Mira: And were you the only teacher or there were shows with other people involved?
Patricia: Well, at that time, it was just me. I think that was the late 70s. And I remember I did several of them with Dafina Nikolovska. She was one of the best students at the time. There were little scenes I remember I prepared. There were a few students who took part. Filip Korženski and Emilija Saržovska, as well as Dafina. They would perform little sketches, which I wrote to use the vocabulary connected with the theme of the show. And, at the time when Goran and Dragi and Ljupčo were studying together - I think Ljupčo was a year above Goran - those three would prepare sketches for the students. Then when I was working in the Department, we had evenings when they did shows. They did the whole of Shakespeare once, with a brief scene for each play. I remember Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example. Goran borrowed my dressing gown and he had a pillow over his stomach as if he were pregnant. He came on and lost the pillow. That was Love’s Labour’s Lost! The sketches were all Monty-Python style.
Mira: Where did they perform?
Patricia: In the library.
Mira: In the library in front of students?
Patricia: Yes, yes.
Mira: So these were library performances.
Patricia: I just remember that particular one, but I think it was mainly Goran, Dragi and Ljupčo, and I must have taken part and various other people, but I do remember that Shakespeare one was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Mira: Do you remember the name of the show that you participated in with Vlatko for Macedonian Television?
Patricia: I’ll see if I can find that. I think I did the series for a few years.
Mira: Okay. Anything else? Any other anecdotes? Maybe for the Struga Poetry Evenings? I guess that was also a moment where you would all get together and sing, and eat, and socialise and have great fun.
Patricia: Graham particularly, of course, being a poet himself, and Peggy - she was also a poet. They took part in the Struga Poetry Evenings. Goran and I, were more in the theatre, so it was more going to theatres all over the country, and he was on a jury here and there, and, of course, his plays were produced all over the country. So, that’s what I remember most is going to theatres all over Yugoslavia and watching his plays. And abroad, of course. It was wonderful, especially on Brijuni, the Ulysses Theatre on Brijuni with Rade Šerbedžija - he founded it. We spent many summers there in Croatia and that’s where Goran was commissioned to write Odysseus, for that theatre. And that was marvellous. I think it’s one of his best plays, definitely. Anyway, sorry, I’m getting sidetracked.
Mira: It’s okay.
Patricia: And the other thing was the IATEFL conferences, the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. I would go every year to those and sometimes I would present a paper. Very often I would come back and talk to my colleagues about different things I’d heard at those conferences. Sometimes they would also go to one. I know when there was one in Sofia - many of us went to the Sofia Conference.
Mira: Yeah, it seems that back then, research was not that much promoted, as it is now. All of the lektors at the Department now continue with their professional development, obtain Master’s degrees, PhD degrees.
Patricia: Yes, yes.
Mira: Back then, people were more into teaching the language and doing translation. That has changed. Now it’s impossible in a way to continue as a lector. It’s considered that you need to make some progress with research as well, which is strange.
Patricia: We would present papers, you know, on a specific theme.And I did my M.A. and Mirka did her M.A. That’s when we introduced the status of Viš lektor, for those who had an M.A. But, neither of us finished a PhD. I started doing one, but never finished it because childcare was more important.
Mira: I started as a lector and then Viš lektor and that position was really respected. And I still respect lectors a lot and always fight for their better treatment in terms of salary, in terms of classes and the burden and the overload they have. So, although now I’m an Associate professor, I always fight for the rights of lectors because I know how hard and important it is. But, unfortunately, the attitude has changed, you know. You need to make progress. You need to do research. That’s not true. That’s not true at all.
Mira: Patricia, did you participate in any course book writing or course book design? I don’t know how it was back then. Were people encouraged to produce their own materials or you only used materials from abroad? See, this is something that I don’t know. I know that Katerina Babamova worked on some dictionaries with Zoze Murgoski on idioms but I don’t know about teaching materials, whether there were any original teaching materials produced by the Department people?
Patricia: No, I don’t think we ever produced textbooks, but obviously we had our materials, which we used every year. And so, it was like having a textbook in a way. But I was often asked to edit textbooks for schools. But I don’t think I ever actually wrote any myself, no.
Mira: Great, okay. Do you remember what were the favourite teaching methods among students back then?
Patricia: Well, I remember introducing group work.
Mira: Group work, cool.
Patricia: Group work didn’t exist, of course, when I arrived. And again, that was a bit frowned upon because you should be giving individual attention. But it worked very well. If you have a class of 20, it’s much better if you’ve got five groups of four who can talk together, and then you can go round and listen to what each group is doing than just trying to have a teacher at the front of the class teaching 20 people, obviously you’re not going to be able to provide enough individual attention. What else did we do?
Mira: For example, did you sing songs? Because this is something we don’t do. And I remember with Natka Gogova when she was my lektor in Year 2, we sang a lot, and we learned vocabulary through lyrics, song lyrics. But I don’t know why that method has been abandoned, you know? Now students listen to Ted talks and they like that a lot or they listen to those podcasts, with influencers. And yeah, they can totally get endorsed with this. But, if you play a tape with a unit or two people doing some kind of a role play that doesn’t work anymore, students don’t have focus for that. It must be visual.
Patricia: It’s great that we have those podcasts and things nowadays. That’s really good, isn’t it? Yes. Wonderful. Well, I remember when I learned Macedonian, Natka would teach us all those songs. I can still sing them today, and I loved them. I remember Jano mori and Ti junačko pile. I remember to this day laughing at those words, translating them as ‘heroic chicken’. Natka put me right that pile didn’t mean ‘chicken’ in that case. But as for English songs, yes, we used them informally. And, as I said, I used them for the TV programmes.
Mira: Right, for the show.
Patricia: But I didn’t use them much in classes for students. I was mainly teaching the third and fourth years.
Mira: So, was it more of a Grammar-Translation method that was popular back then? Basically, in the 70s, Grammar-Translation. You take texts, you do an in-depth analysis basically of the linguistic structures. You talk about tenses, suffixes…
Patricia: Well, because translation was a separate subject, we didn’t do that in lektors’ classes. No, we would use those units from the books that I told you about, the Cambridge books. So you’d practise all the skills-listening skills, reading skills, writing skills and speaking skills. It was basically making sure that you practised all four skills.
Mira: Do you remember what you taught for the writing section, or what students needed back then? Because when I was a student, only Peggy taught us some writing in year three and year four. So, let’s say year three was more creative writing, whereas year four was more academic or analytical, or compare and contrast, or an opinion essay, but we didn’t have anything in terms of writing in years one and two. Do you remember whether students had to write reports or write some kind of summaries or reviews? What genres did you cover?
Patricia: I mean, in those units, as I said, there would always be a writing task at the end. But, Peggy, particularly, when she came back later after I had left in the 90s, she introduced a composition course and she was proud of that. And I mentioned it at her funeral because she really did contribute a lot with that.
Mira: So, basically it was tasks related to the units.
Patricia: Yes.
Mira: Depending on the proficiency level.
Patricia: Yes.
Mira: Did you socialise with students? Because that is not the case any more. I remember how much we socialised with our professors, but they were younger, we were closer in terms of age with students. These days I’ve initiated a film club and a theatre club where we watch movies and then we invite someone as a guest speaker, either a director or the Macedonian actors.
Patricia: That’s great.
Mira: I can’t explain how students are not interested in socialising and getting to know those people, but they come, watch the film, take part in the discussion, and leave. I remember once, I invited all of my students to my birthday party, and only two students came. And I know in the United States, because I did my PhD there, how many we would go for Thanksgiving, Christmas holidays, have these after-work parties at someone’s home, but unfortunately socialising is not happening with students now. How was it back then?
Patricia: Certainly at the beginning we socialized a lot because I was very close in age, actually, to the fourth-year students. You know, they would often be 22 and I was 24 when I came. And I remember particularly that first year, Violeta Kuzmanovska was in the fourth-year group. And, Sasha, I can’t remember her surname. There were four of them who were particularly close - we just got on very well, so we would socialise a lot. And, of course, I remember the students who became colleagues like Rajna Koška and Zoran Ančevski and of course, Filip Korženski. He became a translator, but he and his wife Eleonora both became friends. She taught at the Centre for Foreign Languages. Then there was Eleni Bužarovska. she also became a colleague, and Emilija Saržovska. I remember the ones from the beginning rather than the end, - your memory gets worse as you go along!
Mira: Anything else to add?
Patricia: Can’t think of anything. Those were the happiest 18 years of my life, those in Skopje, definitely.
Mira: Do you miss teaching or you do some teaching now? Maybe with grandchildren?
Patricia: Well, yes. My little grandson, Jana’s son, he’s six now, and he could read when he was three. And at school, they say ‘This is amazing! He can read so well, how come?’ And Jana just looks at me and says, ‘Well it’s her fault!’ I used to do flashcards with him, and he loved it. But obviously he’s inherited genes for language and everything else. Jana always says ‘You can’t not be a teacher, can you?’ I say, ‘No!’
Mira: You work on any translation now?
Patricia: With Ljubica Arsovska we’ve translated Lidija Dimkovska’s poetry and Lidija was in Canterbury recently. When was it? Last year. And she was here as a poet in residence. She lives in Slovenia now. So that was with a grant from the Slovenian Foreign Ministry. And, she came to Canterbury. I arranged for her to do a reading at Waterstones here, the bookshop. It was very well attended. There were about 30 people there, and it was really nice. But Lidija really is the only author I translate regularly now. Basically, I’ve worked for many years with Ljubica Arsovska, so if she wants me to edit something, I will. Sometimes, she’ll ask me to translate something, and I might pass it on to Igor, because Igor, my son, is a translator - he’s a very good translator.
Mira: Excellent. I’m so happy we did this interview.
Patricia: Yes. Well, thank you very much.
Mira: We’ll have follow-up questions. This is just the first activity that I have suggested, you know, to dig a little bit into the beginning and hear about your personal experiences. And let’s see what the next phase is and definitely I will keep you updated about everything that is happening. Let’s see how it develops. Let’s see who else we can contact. Let’s see who is going to, you know, show willingness to participate, and we’ll go further.
Patricia: I’m very willing. It’s just, you know, the memory is not so good nowadays…
Mira: It’s excellent. Well, I’m impressed. I don’t remember when I got employed, and Mirka was not sure whether it was 57 or 58 or it was just immediately after the earthquake or two years after the earthquake. So, I said, don’t worry, this is great memory. I don’t remember anything.
Patricia: Whenever I talk to anybody nowadays about anything in the past, you know, I say, well, ‘a couple of years ago’, which means any time in the last 20 years, probably.
Mira: My mom used to say nekni. She loved that word and nekni meant from the beginning of the world and the Big Bang until five minutes ago.
Patricia: My mother-in-law used that word as well.
Mira: It’s a wonderful word. Okay, thank you Pat, thanks a lot.
Patricia: Lovely to see you.
Mira: And, yeah, whatever you find from Vlatko, whether the title of the show or any link would be very, very helpful. And I would be grateful.
Patricia: Thank you. You too. And give everyone in Skopje my love. And, yes, happy memories.
Mira: Say hi to Igor.
Mira: We can maybe sit together because he might actually remember things as a kid, coming to the Department.
Patricia: Well, I can tell you that that was one of the funniest things I remember in the Department. One day Goran and I were there together and we had Igor with us - he must have been about 4 or 5. And he was a very beautiful boy. Well, he is still handsome, but as a child, he really was beautiful, you know, and, I remember one of the students saying ‘Oh my goodness, what a beautiful boy, but he doesn’t look like either of you!’ Quite right. He looked more like my father, actually. But I remember Goran laughing a lot about that.
Mira: Thank you Pat, thanks a lot. Yes, I’ll say definitely say hi to Natka, Mirka and Violeta. So, I’m going to see them again. And keep in touch.
Patricia: I will. Thank you.
English Department colleagues (from left to right): Evica Konecni, Ivanka Koviloska, Velko Siljanoski, Aleksandrina Ilieva, Ljupco Stefanovski, Marija Janeva and Patricia Marsh
Патриша Марш
