Earl Stevick
Earl Wilson Stevick (1923–2013) was an American applied linguist whose work gave humanistic language teaching its most thoughtful English-language advocate. He studied government at Harvard, took an MA in TEFL at Columbia, and earned a PhD in linguistics at Cornell before spending the bulk of his career at the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute, where he developed courses for African and other less-commonly-taught languages.
Stevick's distinction was taking the so-called designer methods seriously when most of the field preferred to mock them. He wrote with patient curiosity about Curran's Community Language Learning, Gattegno's Silent Way, and Lozanov's Suggestopedia, and used them to press a deeper argument: that what happens inside and between learners matters more than the technique on the page. His often-quoted line from A Way and Ways sums up the stance. "Success depends less on materials, techniques, and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom."
Career
- Harvard (government), Columbia (MA TEFL), Cornell (PhD in linguistics)
- Long career at the Foreign Service Institute developing language courses, including for Swahili, Shona, and other African languages
- Continued writing, speaking, and mentoring well into retirement
- A practising Christian whose faith informed his attention to the person behind the learner
Published Work
- Memory, Meaning and Method (1976)
- Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways (1980)
- Teaching and Learning Languages (1982)
- Images and Options in the Language Classroom (1986)
- Success with Foreign Languages (1989)
- Humanism in Language Teaching (1990)
- Working with Teaching Methods: What's at Stake? (1998)
Influence
- A founding figure in the humanistic strand of ELT, alongside writers such as Moskowitz, Rinvolucri, and Underhill
- Made memory, meaning, and the inner life of the learner legitimate objects of methodology
- Gave the designer methods a fair hearing that shaped later thinking on teacher presence, affect, and learner agency
- Widely cited across teacher-education writing on learner-centredness and classroom atmosphere