Adamson, Robin 1938-

PERSONAL:

Born March 30, 1938. Education: University of Queensland, Australia, B.A., Dip.Ed.; St. Andrews University, Scotland, B.Phil.; University of Edinburgh, Scotland, Ph.D.; studied in Paris, France, at the Sorbonne.

ADDRESSES:

Office—European Languages and Studies, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy., Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, educator. University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia, instructor, 1965-67, honorary research fellow, 2001—; University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, director of the Centre for Applied Language Studies, 1967-2001. Chair of the Scottish Universities French Language Research Association; former consultant, Scottish Centre for Language Teaching, University of Stirling.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Officer, Ordre des palmes academiques (France), 1989.

WRITINGS:

La Poésie Résistante: Lexis, Semantics and Syntax in the War Poetry of Paul Eduard, University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1983.

(With S. Taylor) Communicative Competence in French at Final Honours Level, Economic and Social Research Council (London, England), 1988.

En fin de compte. Livre de l'enseignant, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1988.

French Grammar, Teach Yourself (London, England), 1998.

(Editor) A. Lodge and S. Taylor, Le Français en faculté, 3rd revised edition, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1999.

(With Brigitte Edelston) French Grammar, McGrawHill (Chicago, IL), 2004.

The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis?, Multilingual Matters (Buffalo, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robin Adamson is an Australian and an honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia. However, she spent most of her professional career at Scotland's University of Dundee, where she worked in various fields, including the teaching of communicative language and the acquisition of a second language. Adamson has been instrumental in the teaching of French, an interest spurred by the fact that several of her ancestors from Scotland were killed while fighting for France. She has edited or written several language texts, including French Grammar, with Brigitte Edelston, a native French speaker.

Adamson's 2007 work, The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis?, is an examination of how the French view their own language. Adamson, "drawing on a lifelong passion for the French language," as a reviewer for Reference & Research Book News noted, examines facets of the language, beginning with a general history of the defense of French. From that point, Adamson branches out into a study of how government policy attempts to defend the purity of the language and then moves into a comparison of French with other major languages of the European Union, including German, Italian, English, and Spanish.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2007, review of The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis?

ONLINE

University of Western Australia Web site,http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/ (January 15, 2008), "Friends of the Library Talk: English and the Languages of Europe: Dr. Robin Adamson."