Alan Moys and Nala
Harmer Parr adds his tribute to one of NALA’s founder members
Alan is best known for his role as Director of CILT, but it would be wrong not to consider his considerable contribution to Nala, the National Association of Language Advisers. I learned by googling Nala for this tribute that the Association shares its acronym with the Disney film The Lion King, where Nala is the lion heroine. This seemed appropriate to me, as Alan Moys is certainly the Lion King as far as Nala is concerned. Can it be an accident that his name simply reverses the letters of the acronym? He conceived Nala, planned it and formed it, with the help of the few languages advisers there were back in those distant days over half a century ago. The very concept of language adviser was a new one in the late ‘60s. The group was small, but it was certainly distinguished. Alan organised the first ever Nala Conference in 1969 at his then home town of Buxton, in Derbyshire. Within 20 years, languages went from a subject studied by the top 30% of the ability range to one open to all. Nala made a huge contribution to that development, culminating in the halcyon days in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when all learned a language up to age 14 and a majority continued for a further two years. Sadly, the 21st century has reversed this trend.
I first came across Alan’s name via the Nala Journal in the mid ‘70s, when I was a young teacher looking for some intellectual stimulus. The Modern Language Association had a Journal that was really aimed at grammar school teachers, a world I knew well having been filled to bursting point at school with Racine and Corneille. There was not much there to inform the teaching of the third year bottom set in my comprehensive school on a Friday afternoon. The Audio-Visual Language Association, which later became BALT – the British Association of Language Teachers – produced a journal that appealed to the reformers, so that the languages world was divided into Roundheads and Cavaliers, both with axes to grind. Eventually the camps came together in the new Association for Language Learning, which has served the languages world so well ever since. Nala stood above any squabbles, and its Journal routinely contained more reflective and thought-provoking pieces on emerging issues. Reformers, certainly, but not zealots, and Alan was the driving force.
As Director of CILT, the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research, Alan moved to a position where his local influence on languages in Derbyshire could be extended into a national role. The research dimension was important to him. He wanted to ensure that developments in languages were solidly based. Training courses organised by CILT became an important part of the languages landscape, with Alan at the forefront as organiser and often presenter. In spite of this busy schedule, Alan never lost his connection with and contribution to Nala. I particularly remember a conference in the early 1990s, when Local Authorities were being decimated as their funding was cut to provide money for the setting up of Ofsted. Advisers were falling off the perch left, right and centre, and all of us feared for our jobs and futures. In this febrile atmosphere, Alan agreed to serve again as Chair, and then later as President. His long experience and huge intelligence steered us through this very difficult period, and enabled the Association to regroup and regrow.
As a permanent member of the Executive during these difficult days of the early and mid ‘90s, I was able to observe Alan’s consummate skill in steering a course between the many rocks in the choppy sea. He was a great organiser of agendas and a skilful chair of meetings. His was the leading brain behind most of Nala’s considered responses to national issues and initiatives. We seemed to spend a lot of weekends trapped in hotels in those days, concocting responses to Government proposals that in one period seemed to drop like confetti. He ensured that there was a lot of fun as well as work. We settled down to a meal on one Saturday evening in a hotel that had annoyed us on a lot of fronts. The menu was almost the last straw, with its ridiculously flowery language and attempts to describe the banal as the exotic. Alan ordered his meal, and then added at the end: ‘and could I have
mine without the adjectives please?’ The remark may have been lost on the manager, but it certainly wasn’t on the rest of us.
It is hard to sum up Alan’s enormous contribution to language teaching in this country. I also doubt if anyone will ever beat his record of attending over 30 consecutive Nala Conferences. Barack Obama once famously replied to Donald Trump’s taunt about his birth certificate, saying that not only could he produce the certificate but also the video of his birth. He then showed an extract from the Lion King. Nala was conceived in the years when television was still in black and white, so I’m unable to produce any video. But I am able to say that Alan was truly a king amongst languages professionals. I shall miss him enormously, and so will anyone who worked with him during those years. Truly an original, who was at the forefront of setting the direction for languages in this country.
Harmer Parr
Former Chair and President of Nala.