J. Marvin Brown

Brown retired from AUA in 1995 and returned to the United States. He died on August 29, 2002 at the age of 77.

From the start, Brown's version of the natural approach at AUA differed from that of Krashen and Terrell in significant ways. There was no speaking practice on the part of students, in accordance with Krashen's input hypothesis that "speaking ability emerges on its own after enough competence has been developed by listening and understanding". "We're trying to find out what will happen if we hold strictly to this part of Krashen's theory," Brown and Palmer wrote in 1988 in The Listening Approach, naming the book after what they called the approach at that time. Therefore, Brown extended to hundreds of hours the silent period where students were not to speak until they could produce language spontaneously, without conscious effort.

In 1984, Brown began teaching language using a comprehension approach of listening to comprehensible input, starting with the following semester's Japanese class, then a natural approach Thai class. He returned to Bangkok to give a demonstration term of natural approach Thai to students and observers funded by the United States Information Agency, and was hired by AUA to give natural approach classes along with the regular structural approach classes.

Brown experienced a "sudden conversion" upon reading a copy of The Natural Approach by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell that his colleague Adrian S. Palmer gave him the next day. "In 1983, I first came across Krashen's idea that we acquire languages by understanding messages, and in no other way," recalled Brown. "The thing that caught my attention was 'and in no other way.' I was pretty well sold on understanding happenings, but now I could consider ruling out everything else. No memorizing, no practicing, no speaking!"

Brown left AUA in 1980 to study physics at the University of Utah. He returned to AUA in 1984 and began the teaching of Thai using his version of the natural approach, which he would develop into Automatic Language Growth.

Brown's approach also had two teachers speaking to one another in front of the class, which allowed students to observe interaction in the target language without speaking it themselves. "[S]tudents watched two or three Thais act out easy-to-understand scenarios describing Thai customs." wrote author Cleo Odzer of the natural approach Thai classes at AUA in the late 1980s.

During the 1970s, Brown was influenced by thinkers such as William T. Powers, taking from his perceptual control theory "that language learning must consist of looking and listening, not practicing," and Timothy Gallwey, from whose Inner Game writings he "saw that thinking just got in the way of performance." Nevertheless, he persisted with trying to achieve fluency in language through conscious practice. While studying physics at the University of Utah, Brown studied Japanese with drills and practice of speeches, but found that "[n]ot a single sentence was ever triggered by a thought." He described hitting "rock bottom" after teaching a Japanese class to use the same method he had used and learning from the students' reviews that "they all hated [him] and [his] practice."

Brown completed his dissertation and received his doctorate from Cornell around January 1962. It was published in 1965 as From Ancient Thai to Modern Dialects by Social Science Association of Thailand Press and has been republished in subsequent years with other writings by Brown about historical Thai linguistics and his theories about phonology.

Brown returned to Bangkok in March 1962 and was hired as staff linguist at American University Alumni Language Center (AUA) by Gordon F. Schmader, whom he had worked alongside at Cornell writing books to teach English to Thais and Burmese respectively. These texts were based on the "General Form", which AUA had been using to teach English since it had opened in 1952.

In 1953 Brown left for Bangkok to continue his research on Thai linguistics and study of the Thai language and remained in Thailand for four years, funded by grants from the Ford Foundation. Returning to Cornell in 1957, he continued his dissertation work there and taught Thai and Burmese. The next year he obtained a Fulbright Fellowship and returned to Thailand to teach linguistics and English in order to train Thai teachers of English, followed by research for his dissertation. Brown had been working on an analysis of Thai grammar, but with time running out he changed to a historical study involving reconstructing ancient Thai from modern dialects. With students from every province of Thailand attending the teacher training college where he had taught, Brown wrote that he was able to obtain the pronunciations of over 1000 words in each of 70 dialects without difficulty. He returned to Cornell in 1960 to teach Thai and Burmese as a teaching fellow and use the data he had collected to reconstruct the phonology of ancient Thai. Brown refused the offer of an assistant professor position at Cornell, having decided to return to Thailand instead.

Brown studied Latin in high school and French, Spanish, and Italian in the late 1940s at the University of Utah. He both studied and taught Thai and Burmese at Cornell. He had also studied German and Indonesian. When he taught Thai and English at AUA using his structural approach, he studied Vietnamese to remind him how it felt for students who were beginners at Thai. Returning to the University of Utah in the early 1980s, he studied Japanese and again studied Mandarin. In the 1990s he attempted to learn the Shantou dialect of Chinese by setting up classes that were like his AUA natural approach Thai classes.

James Marvin Brown (January 28, 1925 – August 29, 2002) was an American linguist who studied the evolution of Thai and related languages, supervised the teaching of English and Thai at AUA Language Center, Bangkok, Thailand and developed the Automatic Language Growth approach to language teaching.

Brown was born in 1925 to Lawrence M. Brown and Fannie D. Brown (née Parker). He grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah.