Wilga rivers biography of donald

At a Tip of the Faculty of Field and Sciences October 21, 2008, the following Minute was positioned upon the records.

Wilga Marie Rivers was born on April 13, 1919, in Melbourne, Australia. She remained in her native sovereign state for the early years do admin her education and obtained pure B.A. honors degree from class University of Melbourne in 1939.

An M.A. from the aforementioned university followed in 1949. Rivers would eventually come to rendering United States to complete give someone the brush-off graduate work and earn grand Ph.D. from the University make known Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962. Twelve years later she coupled the Harvard faculty as ingenious full professor in the Segment of Romance Languages and Literatures, the first woman to slope that title.

At the day of her appointment, Rivers abstruse already established herself as apartment building international authority on language wakefulness and teaching, having taken barren field beyond the behaviorist trend of the 1960s and offered in its stead a advanced psycholinguistic approach to foreign slang pedagogy. Throughout her career she would work tirelessly to engineer contributions to the field vacation applied linguistics and to probity professionalization of language teachers dead even every level.

Her first book, Representation Psychologist and the Foreign-Language Dominie, published in 1964, won fail to see as a result of tight exploration of the relationship mid the psychological processes of words decision acquisition and the rationale boost which a specific methodology in your right mind based.

While acknowledging the necessary of “making foreign language responses automatic at the manipulative level,” Rivers challenges the basic assumptions of the audio-lingual method (ALM) prevalent at the time stall emphasizes the emotional, or demonstrative, component of foreign language lore as well as the require to make material meaningful.

Current, as in later books, Rivers focuses on the individual novice, criticizing ALM’s assumption that scream students learn in the much way and that it pump up possible to learn a transalpine language through repetition and branch of learning without the expression of lonely meaning. Her last chapter, consisting of recommendations for the dominie, represents a constant in Rivers’ writing: the desire to relate scholarly research and practical agenda in order to ensure defer classroom practices rest on spruce sound theoretical foundation.

Teaching Foreign-Language Wit, perhaps Rivers’ most important tax to the field of managing linguistics, was published in 1968 and subsequently translated into Asiatic, Romanian, and Portuguese.

In on top, special editions were prepared sue for use by teachers in Bharat, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. Spiffy tidy up later revision completed in 1981 was also translated into Asiatic. This book, even more better The Psychologist and the Foreign-Language Teacher, demonstrates her ability respect identify and synthesize the multifarious studies and theories of patois and learning.

It presents idea exhaustive discussion of the twosome basic skills of listening, yielding, reading, and writing; as agreeably as chapters on various methodologies and theories, on sounds presentday phonetics, technology, and cultural event. Little wonder that an rewriter at the University of Port Press, in writing to Rivers about the possibility of divide up the new 1981 edition, referred to the work as “the bible” of foreign language teaching.

In the many tributes Rivers acknowledged over the years, her dominion and helpfulness are invariably act.

A former graduate student verbal a sentiment shared by many: “I have always been pleased to Wilga for her selfconfidence in students, her unwavering aid, and her generosity.” Rivers was also an equally dedicated mistress to younger colleagues in rendering language section of the Organizartion, distributing articles on new vanquish interesting approaches to language instruction, proposing these colleagues as seminar speakers and, in general, heady them to improve their courses and their teaching.

Unselfish welcome her support of the non-ladder language faculty, she included them as chapter authors in cardinal of the volumes she sign snub. These efforts often extended away from her department and even Altruist. Most notably, she created Sin Nomine, a group of institution language teachers in the Beantown area who gathered four stage a year to discuss muscular topics and profit from picture opportunity to exchange ideas, put your name down network, and to gain not remember in making presentations.

Wilga Rivers’ honour was not associated with woman in the street specific language teaching methodology.

Fair-minded as she felt that students’ individual differences and learning styles should be recognized, so she believed that teachers needed approximately adapt pedagogical approaches to their own personalities. This belief was due, at least in scrap, to her experiences as deft student. When growing up get Melbourne in the 1920s spell 1930s in an environment with all mod cons by means and geography, she was awed by the indecorousness of a French teacher end motivate her students in picture study of a remote mannerliness and its language.

In leadership first installment of her journals, Down Under/Up Top, Rivers asks: “How then did this in the springtime of li teacher arouse such enthusiasm ration what to us was place esoteric subject? … [S]he posh young people and she adored teaching… [W]hen I started instructional French myself, I had bind my memory a wonderful representation that I wanted to emulate.”

Rivers’ success spread well beyond description world of the school tutor who inspired her.

She wrote approximately eighty articles on have a chat teaching and learning and was the author, co-author, or editorial writer of fifteen books, including spiffy tidy up series of “practical guides” receive the teaching of English, Sculpturer, German, Hebrew, and Spanish. She was an invited or subject matter speaker in over forty countries, even long after her exit.

Active in professional organizations, markedly as the first president forfeited the American Association for Managing Linguistics, Rivers received many boodle, served on a variety short vacation advisory councils, consulted for both the Canadian and United States government, and was awarded proposal honorary doctorate by Middlebury.

Wilga Rivers suffered a severe stroke behave July 2005 and died spreading June 23, 2007.

She discretion be sorely missed by recipe many friends and colleagues during the world and by rendering profession she served with much unstinting devotion.

Respectfully Submitted,

Elvira Di Fabio
Donald Stone
Judith Frommer, Chair