John Rassias, a Dartmouth professor whose theatrical, immersive approach to teaching foreign languages rapidly, known as the Rassias Method, has been used by thousands of teachers around the world since the 1960s, died Wednesday at his home in Norwich, Vt. He was 90.
His son, Athos, confirmed the death.
Professor Rassias (pronounced RAH-see-us) developed his method while advising the Peace Corps in the early 1960s on how to train volunteers assigned to French-speaking African countries.
He brought to the task his own painful memories of the rote method. In fourth grade, he bit in half a pencil that a French teacher had stuck down his throat to elicit the proper pronunciation of a French “r.”
Drawing on his experience studying acting in France, he put the teacher in the role of performer, acting out words and expressions in imaginary real-life settings and inculcating vocabulary and grammar through rapid-fire drills that gave students no time to think in English.
He taught numbers by rolling dice and staged mock news conferences in which students questioned foreign dignitaries.
He brought out a head of cabbage to illustrate the French expression “mon petit choux” — an endearment, like “sweetheart,” whose literal meaning is “my little cabbage.”
In a favorite exercise, he blindfolded one student and had the others guide him or her through an imaginary minefield, blocked by chairs and desks, without using English. If they failed, he warned, the student would blow up.
“The minute you begin to speak another language, it’s no longer foreign,” Professor Rassias told The New York Times in 1977.
Over the years, Professor Rassias and his assistants taught Spanish to New York City Transit police officers, Japanese to business executives and German to American skiers preparing for a season of World Cup events in Austria, Switzerland and Germany.
John Arthur Rassias was born on Aug. 20, 1925, in Manchester, N.H. His parents were Greek immigrants, and he grew up speaking Greek at home.
After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He served in an amphibious unit and saw combat at the Battle of Okinawa.
After earning a degree in French at the University of Bridgeport in 1950, he attended the University of Dijon as a Fulbright scholar and remained to complete his doctoral degree in 1952.
On returning to the United States, he began teaching French at the University of Bridgeport, taking a year in the late 1950s to study at René Simon’s drama school in Paris and at the Phonetics Institute.
In 1964 he began working as a consultant for the Peace Corps. Two years later he was asked to develop its first pilot language program for Africa, training volunteers heading to Ivory Coast.
His language-teaching method was adopted by the Peace Corps and formalized, after he began teaching at Dartmouth in 1965, as the Dartmouth Intensive Language Model, which was used throughout the university.
In 1978, Professor Rassias was named to President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, which developed national policy guidelines for improving foreign-language study in the United States.
He founded the Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures at Dartmouth, which offers intensive language courses using his method.
His daughter Helene Rassias-Miles, executive director of the Rassias Center, recently brought his program to more than 2,000 teachers of English in Mexican public schools.
In addition to his son and his daughter Helene, Professor Rassias is survived by another daughter, Veronica Markwood, and nine grandchildren. His wife, the former Mary Evanstock, died in 2012.
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