Word: grammars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spoken, and students are assigned native pseudonyms by which they are known throughout the course. Starting first with the mastery of sound, they mimic every word of their instructors-most of them natives of the country whose language they teach. Gradually, students move up from sounds to basic grammar to sentences to conversation and writing. To supplement class work, they have textbooks written by Monterey's 381-man faculty, individual tape recorders, closed-circuit television films in the institute's elaborate language...
...real mission," says Dr. Erwin Gordon, an academic adviser to the institute, "is communication, not vocabulary or grammar." Monterey's students get heavy doses of local history and culture, often take time out to sample the native cuisine-if available-in San Francisco restaurants. To test a student's practical command of his language, Monterey has set up facsimile banks, post offices and stores where he is forced to negotiate a bank loan, mail home a package or shop for his dinner-all without lapsing into English...
...course and for which the German Department at Harvard is famous are aural-oral. Stein counsels his future college teachers to develop in their students the ability for automatic response and communications--the same kind a child develops learning his native language. He opposes this to the old-fashioned grammar-and-translation approach. In fact, a "Do's and Don'ts" sheet which Stein distributes to his teaching fellows concludes with a warning: "There is a departmental ban on the use of the words 'memorize' and 'translate,' and a total ban on the translation of any sentence German-to-English...
Despite a lifelong devotion to language, Funk had no use for stylistic precision. "Let's throw the old textbooks out the window," he once wrote, "along with the words correct and incorrect, because there's really no such thing as grammar, but only an ever-changing language pattern formed by everyday usage...
They proceed to study the elements of comparative linguistics. The professor outlines the history and theory of the "Neo-Spanish" tongues, which all share an identical vocabulary and grammar. This, of course, makes it impossible to tell them apart... By now the pupil is completely distracted thanks to a toothache, but the professor persists. His lesson, a mixture of sophistry and flights of fancy, is incomprehensible. At last, in the climactic scene, he holds up an imaginary object and orders the girl to repeat "knife" in each of the Neo-Spanish idioms. But her pain has become unbearable, she cannot...