I first met Earl when I invited him to give a workshop for teachers in Seville in the mid-1990s. For many reasons this was a very special experience for me, one from which I learned a lot. I felt very close to Earl, in part, of course, because I had read and long admired his writing in the field. But there was something else. Something I couldn't put my finger on until one day I asked him where he was from and he told me that he had grown up in Joplin, Missouri. That was it. My father and my uncle came from a town just a few miles away, and Earl's way of speaking reminded me of that of my father and uncle. And just as his speaking voice touched a deep part of me, his writing has given a clear and elegant formulation to many things I intuited were important in language teaching. His presence has been a guiding light for me throughout the years.

My first meeting with Earl Stevick was in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1973, at SIT. I had the honor of sharing a special weekend program with him in which we worked with the SIT TESOL students. I was then a fledgling assistant professor at the University of Michigan. In his first lecture, he started out by stating a seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers, e.g., ‘D2K7S,’ then showing how that ‘syntactic’ structure could be manipulated – by substitution, permutation and deletion – just like language. We of course discovered the sequence wasn't random at all, but rather ordered by a set of governing rules.

More memorable was the fact that this rather famous person was approachable, down to earth and genuinely interested in helping seminar participants to apply psychological foundations of language teaching to their own classroom practice.

And he's been doing so ever since! Earl is a person who, rightly so, will not spoon feed a student, but rather will make that student think. In many ways, perhaps subconsciously, I have sought to model Earl's pedagogical artistry in my own teaching.