Distinguished scholar began career at Gisborne Boys’ High

Linguistic command: Professor Bernard Spolsky is remembered as a major force in the world of language and linguistics, but also as a 'nice bloke' who coached the GBHS first 11 hockey team to a stellar year in 1955. Picture supplied

A former teacher at Gisborne Boys' High, Professor Bernard Spolsky, died on Saturday in Israel.

Professor Spolsky was a powerhouse in the world of language. As a former professor emeritus in linguistics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and a swag of US universities, his specialty was sociolinguistics, educational linguistics and applied linguistics.

Professor Spolsky's parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to New Zealand before World War 2. He was born in Wellington in 1932. He studied at Victoria University before teaching English at Boys' High.

He moved on from Gisborne, completing a PhD in Montreal and then proceeding to several teaching positions in the US, notably at McGill University, Indiana University and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he directed the Navajo Reading Study from 1969 to 1977.

That study was supported by the Ford Foundation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the US Office of Education, and its objective was to develop materials for Navajo literacy programmes. Its influence in the materials it produced, the students it supported and further research it stimulated had a profound impact on many aspects of life for the Navajo Nation.

A major sub-component of the Navajo Reading Study was the Teacher Training Project, established in 1973 to prepare bilingual Navajo teachers.

It was while he was at Albuquerque that he met another prominent Kiwi also working in language research and linguistics, Professor Jack Richards.

“He became one of the world's most distinguished scholars in the field of language testing and the sociology of language and religion, among many other interests,” Professor Richards said.

Language testing and the sociology of language is about measuring people's ability in a language.

“It's crucial to how people perform in tests, how people get accepted for immigration . . . it plays a huge role in giving people access to all sorts of things, and he did a lot of work in that area.”

Professor Spolsky was an orthodox Jew, and he moved with his wife and two children to Israel, where he began research into the dynamics of multilingual societies — such as Israel, with two major languages side by side, as well as a high number of immigrant languages — and he researched issues of language policy in mutilingual societies.

“That's very important even in New Zealand, with the growth in te reo,” Prof Richards said.

He recalled that he contacted Spolsky when he was in Albuquerque and visited him there.

“He met me at the airport, and he asked me if I had gone to school in Gisborne, and it turned out he had taught my brother David and my sister Rosemary at high school in Gisborne. He was a very charming man.”

Prof Richards said that as an orthodox Jew, Spolsky was pro-Israel, and his visits to New Zealand were not without incident. Pro-Palestinian protesters sometimes made themselves known to him when he was giving lectures.

“It was controversial, he was an advocate for the state of Israel,” he said.

Prof Spolsky wrote and edited two dozen books and 250 articles and chapters. He was founding editor of three journals, Applied Linguistics, Journal of Asia TEFL, and Language Policy. He lived in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Dick Glover, a former student and teacher at Gisborne Boys' High, remembered Bernard Spolsky coaching the first 11 hockey team, way back in 1955.

“It was a good year,” he said.

“We got runner-up that year, and I have everything to be grateful to him for his coaching. He was a nice bloke.”

— Andrew McKenna