>>I've been lucky that I've had a really,
I think both representative and broad application, let's say,
of the changes that our profession has taken
through actual contact
with language teaching in my 51 years.
I grew up speaking English and Spanish together in the home,
so I had an already kind of holistic notion
of what knowing more than language was about,
even as I entered grade school.
By the time I got to high school, I really,
I needed to take a foreign language and didn't want,
obviously, to just, I should have probably gotten a more
serious grounding in Spanish,
but wanted something slightly different,
so I wound up taking Latin.
Everyone said it was really good for logical thinking,
it was really good for analytical looking at the system
and so forth, and of course, and this was in the early mid- being used, I think everywhere 00:00:56.770 1970's, the approach that was being used, I think everywhere
and certainly for the so-called dead languages like Latin
and Greek, was the grammar translation method,
where literally it was a fixed body of text that we looked
at each day and went through each one parsing every word
until we knew case, number, gender,
bits and pieces of the language.
Not a communicative style, not, we never spoke Latin, obviously,
we never actually read much aloud even in the class.
It was all about getting the underlying grammatical feel
of the language.
And I think actually, in spite of the fact 00:01:32.470 that I find this method retrograde in 2010,
it gave me a very very good grounding
in what the building blocks of language are;
how languages are put together, and so I don't, in any way,
want to kind of put it down as 4 years
of my life wasted learning Latin.
I still remember actually a good deal of the Latin
that I learned in high school.
And then I entered college, I entered college first and we're the method de jour was the 00:02:00.850 at the mid-70's now, 1976 and the method de jour was the
so called Communicative Code, or I'm sorry, Cognitive Code method
of language instruction.
The idea that you need
to understand how the language works in order to be able
to speak it, and this actually spoke very nicely to my work
in Latin because it was, you get to learn
about the building blocks, I was taking Russian,
you get to learn how Russian is put together
so that you will understand what you're saying.
And actually, speaking proceeded very nicely from this method,
although wespent a great deal of time,
in my view too much time, learning about the language
and not as much time as I would have liked using the language.
But it was an, for that time in particular,
this was relatively innovative, it was, most of my other friends
at University were learning French or Spanish or German
from the again so-called audio-lingual method, the,
using a lot of time, spending a lot of time in language labs
with earphones on listening and repeating
to endless dialogues and so forth.
So I actually felt somewhat privileged doing this new
method, the Cognitive Code, because I got to learn
so many really, I thought, interesting things
about how language works in the class.
So I was learning Russian but I was also learning a lot
about general linguistics of how things were put together.