WEBVTT

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>>I've been lucky that
I've had a really,

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I think both representative and
broad application, let's say,

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of the changes that our
profession has taken

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through actual contact

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with language teaching
in my 51 years.

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I grew up speaking English and
Spanish together in the home,

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so I had an already
kind of holistic notion

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of what knowing more
than language was about,

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even as I entered grade school.

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By the time I got to
high school, I really,

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I needed to take a foreign
language and didn't want,

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obviously, to just, I should
have probably gotten a more

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serious grounding in Spanish,

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but wanted something
slightly different,

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so I wound up taking Latin.

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Everyone said it was really
good for logical thinking,

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it was really good for
analytical looking at the system

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and so forth, and of course,
and this was in the early mid-

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being used, I think everywhere

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1970's, the approach that was
being used, I think everywhere

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and certainly for the so-called
dead languages like Latin

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and Greek, was the
grammar translation method,

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where literally it was a fixed
body of text that we looked

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at each day and went through
each one parsing every word

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until we knew case,
number, gender,

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bits and pieces of the language.

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Not a communicative style, not,
we never spoke Latin, obviously,

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we never actually read much
aloud even in the class.

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It was all about getting the
underlying grammatical feel

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of the language.

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And I think actually,
in spite of the fact

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that I find this method
retrograde in 2010,

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it gave me a very
very good grounding

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in what the building
blocks of language are;

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how languages are put together,
and so I don't, in any way,

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want to kind of put
it down as 4 years

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of my life wasted
learning Latin.

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I still remember actually
a good deal of the Latin

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that I learned in high school.

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And then I entered college, I
entered college first and we're

00:01:54.080 --> 0's now, 1976 and
the method de jour was the

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at the mid-70's now, 1976 and
the method de jour was the

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so called Communicative Code, or
I'm sorry, Cognitive Code method

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of language instruction.

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The idea that you need

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to understand how the language
works in order to be able

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to speak it, and this actually
spoke very nicely to my work

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in Latin because it
was, you get to learn

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about the building blocks,
I was taking Russian,

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you get to learn how
Russian is put together

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so that you will understand
what you're saying.

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And actually, speaking proceeded
very nicely from this method,

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although wespent a
great deal of time,

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in my view too much time,
learning about the language

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and not as much time as I would
have liked using the language.

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But it was an, for that
time in particular,

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this was relatively innovative,
it was, most of my other friends

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at University were learning
French or Spanish or German

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from the again so-called
audio-lingual method, the,

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using a lot of time, spending
a lot of time in language labs

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with earphones on
listening and repeating

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to endless dialogues
and so forth.

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So I actually felt somewhat
privileged doing this new

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method, the Cognitive Code,
because I got to learn

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so many really, I
thought, interesting things

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about how language
works in the class.

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So I was learning Russian
but I was also learning a lot

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about general linguistics of
how things were put together.