Remembering Eleanor Jorden

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great sadness that I inform you of the passing of Eleanor Jorden Wednesday morning, February 18. She was living in the home of her daughter, Telly, and her son-in-law. Her son Temple lived in the vicinity and had been able to see her often. Temple reports that she passed away peacefully in her sleep.

We will always remember her as a great colleague, as a brilliant, charismatic, inspiring teacher and, above all, as a warm, witty and caring human being and friend. She first came to Cornell in 1969 as a Visiting Scholar after retiring from the Foreign Service Institute Language School, where she had held the position of Dean of the School of Asian Languages. In 1971 she was granted tenure at Cornell and the following year founded the FALCON Program. She had already become the primary force in the teaching of Japanese, having published the two-volume text, Beginning Japanese. For many, many decades, year after year Beginning Japanese topped the best-seller list of Yale University Press and it remains in print today. During her time at Cornell, she published Reading Japanese, a revolutionary and highly-acclaimed textbook, still in print. Toward the end of her 18 years at Cornell, she began her mammoth work, Japanese: the Spoken Language, which came out in three volumes. After leaving Cornell in 1988, she assumed a position with the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, DC, where she published, with Richard Lambert, the comprehensive and important study, "Japanese Language Instruction in the United States: Resources, Practice, and Investment Strategy."

Only a small sampling of the awards she has received in her lengthy and productive career include: The Order of the Precious Crown, granted by His Majesty, the Emperor of Japan in 1985; The Japan Foundation Award in 1985; The Papalia Award for Excellence in Teacher Education, from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 1993. She also received four honorary doctorates and served as President of the Association for Asian Studies once and President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese twice.

Bob
[Robert Joseph Sukle]

Japanese scholar Eleanor Jorden died Feb. 11

Eleanor Jorden, a linguist and world leader in language pedagogy and language teacher training, died Feb. 11 at her daughter's home in Connecticut. She was born in 1920.

During her 19 years at Cornell, the professor emerita of modern languages established the university as one of the world's leading institutions for the study of the Japanese language. In 1972 she founded the Full-year Asian Language Concentration (FALCON) program, now in its 37th year. Unlike other programs of the time, FALCON consisted of a full year of intensive language instruction and achieved levels of fluency rarely seen in foreign learners of Japanese.

Jorden came to Cornell in 1969 as a visiting professor of linguistics. She was granted tenure in 1972 and was appointed to the Mary Donlon Algers Chair of Linguistics.

At Cornell Jorden co-wrote two seminal textbooks. "Reading Japanese" was the first in the field to attempt to enable students to read Japanese rather than simply decode it into English. "Japanese: the Spoken Language" represented a new approach to language teaching, rooting the language in its social context and cultural framework, while guiding students toward mastery of appropriate social interaction and grammar.

Jorden left Cornell in 1988 to work at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-wrote the study "Japanese Language Instruction in the United States," which influenced government policy to support the training of Japanese language teachers. Her efforts helped to ensure that the many new programs in Japanese sprouting up across America would be staffed by trained professionals.

Prior to Cornell, Jorden worked at the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute, where she had become a world leader in language teaching with the publication of the landmark textbook "Beginning Japanese." She also founded and directed the service's language school in Japan and served as dean of the service's Asian language school in Washington, D.C.