Paul Pimsleur was a scholar in the field of applied linguistics. He developed the
Pimsleur language learning system, which, along with his many publications,
had a significant effect upon theories of language learning and teaching.
Early life and education Paul M. Pimsleur was born in New York
City and grew up in The Bronx. His father, Solomon Pimsleur, was an
immigrant from France and a composer of music; his American-born mother was a
librarian at Columbia University. Pimsleur earned a bachelor's degree at
the City College of New York, and from Columbia University he earned a master's
degree in psychological statistics and a Ph.D. in French.
Career His first position involved teaching
French phonetics and phonemics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
After leaving UCLA, Pimsleur went on to faculty positions at the Ohio State
University, where he taught French and foreign language education. At the time,
the foreign language education program at OSU was the major doctoral program in
that field in the U.S. While at Ohio State he created and directed the
Listening Center, one of the largest language laboratories in the United
States. The center was developed in conjunction with Ohio Bell Telephone and
allowed self-paced language study using a series of automated tapes and prompts
that were delivered over the telephone. Later, Pimsleur was a professor of
education and romance languages at The State University of New York at Albany,
where he held dual professorships in education and French. He was a Fulbright
lecturer at the Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg in 1968 and
1969 and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of
Foreign Languages. He did research on the psychology of language learning and
in 1969 was section head of psychology of second languages learning at the
International Congress of Applied Linguistics.
His research focused on understanding the language acquisition process,
especially the learning process of children, who speak a language without
knowing its formal structure. The term "organic learning" was applied to that
phenomenon. For this, he studied the learning process of groups made of
children, adults, and multilingual adults. The result of this research was
the Pimsleur language learning system. His many books and articles had an
impact on theories of language learning and teaching.
In the period from 1958 to 1966, Pimsleur reviewed previously published
studies regarding linguistic and psychological factors involved in
language learning. He also conducted several studies independently. This led
to the publication in 1963 of a coauthored monograph, Underachievement
in Foreign Language Learning, which was published by the Modern Language
Association of America. Through this research, he identified
three factors that could be measured to calculate language learning aptitude:
verbal intelligence, auditory ability, and motivation. Pimsleur and his
associates developed the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery based on these
three factors to assess language aptitude. He was one of the first
foreign language educators to show an interest in students who have difficulty
in learning a foreign language while doing well in other subjects. Today, the
PLAB is used to determine the language-learning aptitude, or even a
language-learning disability, among secondary-school students.
Death Pimsleur died unexpectedly of a heart
attack during a visit to France in 1976. Legacy
Since its creation in 1977, The ACTFL-MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for
Research in Foreign Language Education, which is awarded annually, bears his
name. Paul's business partner, Charles Heinle,
continued to develop the Pimsleur courses until he sold the company to
Simon & Schuster Audio in 1997. In 2006, Pimsleur's daughter, Julia
Pimsleur, created the Entertainment Immersion Method® inspired by the
Pimsleur Method, which is the foundation of the Little Pim language teaching
program for young children, sold in the U.S. and 22 countries.
In 2013, Simon & Schuster reissued Dr. Paul Pimsleur's out-of-print book How to
Learn a Foreign Language in hardcover and eBook format to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of Paul Pimsleur's first course.
Selected works Pimsleur, Paul; Quinn, Terence. The
psychology of second language learning: papers from the Second International
Congress of Applied Linguistics, Cambridge, 8–12 September 1969. London,
Cambridge University Press, 1971. ISBN 0521082366
Poems make pictures; pictures make poems. Poems by Giose Rimanelli and Paul
Pimsleur. New York : Pantheon Books. 1972. ISBN 0394923871
Pimsleur, Paul. Encounters; a basic reader. [simplified by] Paul Pimsleur
[and] Donald Berger. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1974. OCLC 947550
Pimsleur, Paul. How to learn a foreign language. Boston, Mass. : Heinle &
Heinle Publishers, 1980. Further reading
Hommage à Paul Pimsleur / mise en œuvre, Robert Galisson. Paris : Didier, 1977.
How To Learn a Language, Carl J. Beuke, PhD. Brief article summarising some of
the points from Paul Pimsleur's book "How To Learn a Foreign Language".
Psychology Today, 2012. References