--- Forwarded Message from "Warren B. Roby" <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 15:49:37 -0700
>From: "Warren B. Roby" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>Organization: Washington State University
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Food for thought

Dear LLTIers,

I trust we have all survived the end of the academic term and the
holidays and are now gearing up for the start of classes.  So we go from
one source of stress to another.  In order to get some relief, I have
taken to reading the "Unabridged Devil's Dictionary of Language
Teaching" which appears as an appendix in the excellent book by Tom
McArthur, Living Words:  Language, Lexicography, and the Knowledge
Revolution.  University of Exeter Press, 1998.  I have selected some
entries related to technology and some of my favorites.

Audiolingualism -- A revolution in language teaching that encourages
students to be audio and teachers to be lingual.

Audiovisual aids -- Those materials and gadgets in a classroom designed
by somebody called Murphy.

Computer assisted language learning -- A procedure by means of which
students can use teachers as backup systems in the event of a power
failure.

Direct Method -- The late nineteenth-century revolution in language
teaching that enabled students to converse fluently in languages they
didn't know.

Eclecticism -- What you believe in when you've got a class to teach in
five minutes and haven't prepared anything according to this year's
panacea.

Feedback -- The return to the input of part of the output of a machine,
system, or language teacher, so as to produce electrical changes that
improve performance.

Gender -- A grammatical category, regardless of sex; a sexual category,
regardless of grammar.

Interaction -- The same thing as intercourse before intercourse became
something else.

Interactive approach -- That view of language teaching and learning
which says everything will be fine when teachers and students get their
acts together.

Language laboratory -- A room full of audiolingual equipment so designed
that there is always one functioning booth less than the number of
students waiting to come in.

Language learner -- A category that includes language students but may
or may not include language teachers.

Overhead projector -- A piece of classroom equipment so designed as to
project your first transparency upside-down no matter how you position
it.

Role-playing -- What we do some of the time in the classroom and all of
the time elsewhere.

Enjoy!
--
Warren B. Roby, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Washington State University
PO Box 642610
Pullman, WA 99164-2610

Tel. 509-335-8672
Fax  509-335-3708
[log in to unmask]
http://www.wsu.edu/~roby/

"Oh, the thinks you can think!"  Dr. Seuss