Wilga m rivers biography of abraham

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Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. High School teacher, Victoria, Australia, Assistant in English language France, Teacher preparatory schools, Associate professor Monash University, Australia, Visiting professor Columbia University, Professor Romance languages and literature, coordinator language instruction Harvard University,professor emerita, from Lectr 44 countries and throughout United States.

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Wilga m rivers biography of abraham: PRINCIPLES OF INTERACTIVE LANGUAGE

Career Add photo. However, she does concede that drills are effective in helping students acquire knowledge of a language, and can be helpful with some aspects of more advanced language skills such as semantic relationships. To supplement the already-established "skill-getting" drills, Rivers suggested that students undergo exercises in which they are thrust into a situation with a simulated monolingual environment of the language they are learning.

She drew on a study by linguist Sandra Savignon conducted on French students to support her claims. These students, who had regular conversations with French native-speakers in French implemented into their studies, reported that they felt more confident in their speaking abilities in the language since they had practice using it in natural conversation.

Rivers believed that this was sufficient evidence for the importance of communication in language study. She reasoned that forcing students to work in an uncomfortable arrangement may take away their motivation to explore their language abilities, and thereby inhibit their intellectual growth. Additional exercises and activities that she suggested are active problem solving using the language, sharing background, interests, and other personally relevant information in the foreign language, and learning to do an activity with all instruction in the foreign language.

Rivers also advocated that foreign language pedagogy be structured based on the preferences of the students, a stance in opposition of the traditional system of extensive grammar and writing of language. She reasoned that students would be more encouraged to engage in language learning if the instruction matched their own interests. To support her claim, she analyzed and released the results of a survey that she conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana in her article The Non-Major: Tailoring the Course to Fit the Person--Not the Image.

The survey produced responses, a number which Rivers further divided based on proficiency level elementary, intermediate, advanced. Furthermore, two-thirds of this number specifically wanted these readings to be newspapers and magazines in the language of their study.

Wilga m rivers biography of abraham: Wilga M. Rivers (). Rivers

Based on these results, Rivers concluded that foreign language students were much more interested in the applications of the languages they were learning, their use in communication, discussion of current events, and media being primary areas of interest. Rivers was also a vocal advocate for the intermingling of psychology and foreign language teaching.

She specifically highlighted the importance of cognitive psychology in foreign and second language acquisition. She studied data from both linguistic and psychological studies to determine what teaching methods best supported the cognitive faculties of adult language learners and helped facilitate their acquisition of a foreign language. She makes specific reference to three systems of cognition identified by American psychologist Jerome Bruner.

These three systems are classified as enactiveiconicand symbolic. She expressed that all three of these systems need to be developed simultaneously in order for students to acquire language effectively. The first system, enactiveis facilitated through stimulus-response conditioning. Through repeated stimulus-response conditioning, language students pick up on patterns in language, which allow them to produce quick responses to basic language structures.

However, since this system is fostered almost solely through stimulus-response conditioning, it has the most limited faculties of the three. The second system of mental representation is iconic.

Wilga m rivers biography of abraham: her eventual retirement in Australian

This system is facilitated through perceptual organization and imagery. As such, Rivers denotes that both auditory and visual stimuli are important for building the iconic system. However, perception of auditory cues can vary both between different students and within individual students themselves based on the environment. This book, even more than The Psychologist and the Foreign-Language Teacher, demonstrates her ability to identify and synthesize the multiple studies and theories of language and learning.

It presents an exhaustive discussion of the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; as well as chapters on various methodologies and theories, on sounds and phonetics, technology, and cultural understanding. In the many tributes Rivers received over the years, her leadership and helpfulness are invariably mentioned. Unselfish in her support of the non-ladder language faculty, she included them as chapter authors in two of the volumes she edited.

These efforts often extended beyond her department and even Harvard. Most notably, she created Sine Nomine, a group of college language teachers in the Boston area who gathered four times a year to discuss specific topics and profit from the opportunity to exchange ideas, to network, and to gain experience in making presentations.