Five Years with the Rassias Method in German: a Follow‐Up Report from the University of Florida

Abstract

The 1982–83 academic year marked the fifth anniversary of the implementation of the Dartmouth Intensive Language Model (DILM) in German at the University of Florida. Since the publication of a report describing our procedure in the April, 1980 issue of FLA, the German Department at the university has experimented with various textbooks and developed some new material for use in German with the DILM. We have also worked with different class sizes and at both slow and fast paces. Revising our test strategy and adding a business component resulted in a sharp increase in our retention rate. We have attracted a number of new majors and built upper division enrollments. There have also been some setbacks with funding and with the attitude of junior faculty. This follow‐up report discusses the pros and cons of the DILM, offers some advice on introducing such a program in any language, and concludes that DILM‐trained students do learn to communicate more effectively than traditionallytaught beginners.

Full Volume 1: Working Papers in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education (WPLCLE)

“…I admit, some of the multimodal approaches are narrative and hard to capture without multimedia. While hardly as performance-focused as something like the Rassias Method (Johnston, 1983;Oller, 1993), pictures would really help readers see the methods at work. Stein (Chapter 2) and Beynon (Chapter 6) draw on similar alternative modalities without the help of visuals that would make the text an asset for practitioners.…”