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Paul Pimsleur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Pimsleur (1928 – 1972) was an authority in the field of applied
linguistics. He taught French phonetics and phonemics at the University of California,
Los Angeles after obtaining his Ph.D. in French and a master's degree in psychological
statistics from Columbia University. After leaving UCLA, Pimsleur went on to faculty
positions at Ohio State University, where he taught French and foreign language
education. At the time, the foreign language education program at OSU was the major
doctoral program in that field in the US. While at Ohio State he created and directed
the Listening Center, one of the largest language laboratories in the United States.
Pimsleur was later a Professor of Education and Romance Languages at The State University
of New York at Albany, where he held dual professorships in Education and French.
He was also a Fulbright lecturer at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg,
and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
He did research on the psychology of language learning and in 1969 was Section Head
of Psychology of Second Languages Learning at the International Congress of Applied
Linguistics.
His research focused on understanding the language acquisition process, especially
the organic learning of children who speak a language without knowing its formal
structure. For this, he studied the learning process of groups made of children,
adults, and multilingual adults. The result of this research was the Pimsleur language
learning system. His many books and articles had an impact on theories of language
learning and teaching.
In the period from 1958 to 1966, Pimsleur reviewed previously published studies
regarding linguistic and psychological factors involved in language learning. He
also conducted several studies himself. This lead to the publication in 1963 of
a coauthored monograph, Underachievement in Foreign Language Learning, which was
published by the Modern Language Association of America. Through this research,
he identified three factors that could be measured to calculate language aptitude:
verbal intelligence, auditory ability and motivation. Pimsleur and his associates
developed the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (PLAB) based on these three factors
to assess language aptitude. He was one of the first foreign language educators
to show an interest in students who have difficulty in learning a foreign language,
while doing well in other subjects. Today, the PLAB is used to determine the language
learning aptitude or even a language learning disability among secondary school
students.
Dr. Pimsleur died unexpectedly of pneumonia during a visit to France in 1972 Retrieved
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur
This page was last modified 00:59, 9 February 2007. All text is available under
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark
of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit
charity.
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