LINGUIST List 20.623
Sat Feb 28 2009
All: Obituary: Eleanor Jorden
Editor for this issue: Catherine Adams
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1. Peter T.
Daniels,
Obituary: Eleanor Jorden
Message 1: Obituary: Eleanor Jorden
Date: 28-Feb-2009
From: Peter T. Daniels <grammatimverizon.net>
Subject: Obituary: Eleanor Jorden
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Eleanor Jorden, a linguist and world leader in language pedagogy andlanguage teacher training, died Feb. 11 at her daughter's home inConnecticut. She was born in 1920.
During her 19 years at Cornell, the professor emerita of modern languagesestablished the university as one of the world's leading institutions forthe study of the Japanese language. In 1972 she founded the Full-year AsianLanguage Concentration (FALCON) program, now in its 37th year. Unlike otherprograms of the time, FALCON consisted of a full year of intensive languageinstruction and achieved levels of fluency rarely seen in foreign learnersof Japanese.
Jorden came to Cornell in 1969 as a visiting professor of linguistics. Shewas granted tenure in 1972 and was appointed to the Mary Donlon AlgersChair of Linguistics.
At Cornell Jorden co-wrote two seminal textbooks. "Reading Japanese" wasthe first in the field to attempt to enable students to read Japaneserather than simply decode it into English. "Japanese: The Spoken Language"represented a new approach to language teaching, rooting the language inits social context and cultural framework, while guiding students towardmastery of appropriate social interaction and grammar.
Jorden left Cornell in 1988 to teach at the National Foreign LanguageCenter in Washington, D.C., where she co-wrote the study "Japanese LanguageInstruction in the United States," which influenced government policy tosupport the training of Japanese language teachers. Her efforts helped toensure that the many new programs in Japanese sprouting up across Americawould be staffed by trained professionals.
Prior to Cornell, Jorden worked at the U.S. Department of State's ForeignService Institute, where she had become a world leader in language teachingwith the publication of the landmark textbook "Beginning Japanese." Shealso founded and directed the service's language school in Japan and servedas dean of the service's Asian language school in Washington, D.C.
(This notice originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle, online:http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb09/JordenObit.html)
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