Ron Carter
All the good superlatives applied to Ron. He was a wonderful academic: dedicated and tireless, enthusiastic, enormously productive, sharp and insightful without being flashy, and exceptionally generous with his time and engagement with students and with his colleagues, younger and older. He made important contributions to so many fields: stylistics, language teaching, vocabulary studies, English grammar, corpus linguistics, to name only some. As a result he was constantly, constantly, in demand. I remember dinner at his house in Nottingham one summer (he had found me some work on a summer school there): the phone never stopped ringing for him!
I had Ron as an immediate colleague for just one year: when he came out to the National University of Singapore in the early 1980s, on a one-year visit. Under his influence, that was probably the most stimulating and enjoyable year of my academic career. He encouraged hard work and real commitment from those around him, but he also had the knack of doing everything with enormous good humour; laughter was rarely far away from the learning. I know he was equally supportive of many other teachers and academics in English Studies and Applied Linguistics, in the UK especially but elsewhere too. I can't think of anyone of recent times who has had as much positive, enabling influence on the careers and therefore the lives of people working in those fields. If I haven't yet pointed out that Ron was also one of the founding members of PALA, and always a vigorous advocate for everything it proclaims, this is only because it is only one of very many service roles he filled over the years.
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Michael Toolan
September 2018
University of Birmingham
I had Ron as an immediate colleague for just one year: when he came out to the National University of Singapore in the early 1980s, on a one-year visit. Under his influence, that was probably the most stimulating and enjoyable year of my academic career. He encouraged hard work and real commitment from those around him, but he also had the knack of doing everything with enormous good humour; laughter was rarely far away from the learning. I know he was equally supportive of many other teachers and academics in English Studies and Applied Linguistics, in the UK especially but elsewhere too. I can't think of anyone of recent times who has had as much positive, enabling influence on the careers and therefore the lives of people working in those fields. If I haven't yet pointed out that Ron was also one of the founding members of PALA, and always a vigorous advocate for everything it proclaims, this is only because it is only one of very many service roles he filled over the years.
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Michael Toolan
September 2018
University of Birmingham