Charles Carpenter Fries: His Oral Approach for Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages

"EFL Oral Approach" is a digital copy of nine symposium papers presented at the Georgetown University TESOL Convention, July 12, 1985 “to reconsider and reevaluate the effect that [Charles Carpenter] Fries had on … teaching and learning“ foreign languages, particularly English as a Foreign Language at the English Language Institute, University of Michigan, 1940s-1980s. (Papers were originally published in 1989 by Georgetown University Press as "Charles Carpenter Fries: His ‘Oral Approach’ for Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages".) The symposium goal was to correct common misconceptions (which continue to exist in the literature) that the Oral Approach was “audio-lingual” (it wasn’t, it was aural-oral), “behavioristic” (no, meaning-based), “mimicry-memorization” (no, meaning-cued responses), “mechanistic” (no, communicative), “pattern drill” (no, pattern practice). Papers were presented in three sections: Setting, Concepts: the ‘Oral Approach’ in Practice, Methodologies: Materials and Instruction, followed by a Discussion and an Issues and Observations afterword. Symposium participants were: William G. Moulton, Edward M. Anthony, Peter H. Fries, William E. Norris; Betty Wallace Robinett, Frederick J. Bosco, Jeris E. Strain; Joan Morley, Joyce Gilmour Zuck. Discussion was by F. J. Bosco and Diane Larsen-Freeman; Issues and Observations were by J. E. Strain.