I’d never heard of the Rassias language teaching methodology before an American-trained colleague brought it up recently. It’s like some in-your-face audiolingual/communicative language teaching hybrid.

It seems like Rassias himself was quite the character:

(from Stansfield, Charles, and Jeanne Hornor. “The Dartmouth-Rassias Model of Teaching Foreign Languages.” ADFL Bulletin 12.4 (1981): 23-27.)

I’m not sure our raw meat and egg budget is big enough to get all staff on board with this method. Alas…

[Note: I’d been meaning to write this little blog post for a while, and then I do, and only then realize that John Rassias had just died a few days earlier…]