Abstract:

In the CALICO '96 Keynote Address Don Fischer cited two unpublished papers, "The Asheel-Terrapin Interviews:" "Interview #1: The Desert" and "Interview #2: LISLO and IPPBID." The following article offers these two fictive interviews for the first time in published form. The author first presented "Interview #1: The Desert" in November 1981 as a skit at a luncheon meeting in the Air Force Academy Officer's Club. The luncheon was part of the pre-conference session on computers and foreign language teaching held at the Air Force Academy during the 1981 Annual Meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). He wrote "Interview #2: LISLO and IPPBID" about the same time but does not recall presenting it at the luncheon. "Interview #1" was a credo on the nature of language learning and teaching, which, collectively, the writer had been doing for about twenty years at the time he wrote the piece. "Interview #2" was a personal cognitive manifesto about language learning and technology. The only update needed after some sixteen years of technological change is to refer to multimedia rather than videodisc in the second interview. Admirers of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter 1979) should note that in French "Achilles" is pronounced more or less like Asheel.

Author: A. Allen Rowe