Steve began studying French in elementary school, but became much more serious about its study following a summer spent as an exchange student, living with a French family, before his senior year in high school. He majored in French at Michigan State University, where he was selected to Phi Beta Kappa, the Honors College, the National Spanish Honors Society and from where he graduated with high honors in 1975, earning his BA in French. His undergraduate studies also took him to l'Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes, France and to the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico. Following 5 years of teaching and Christian youth work in Illinois after graduation, Steve returned to M.S.U. in 1980 and obtained his MA in Curriculum and Instruction two years later.

After eight years as a French and Spanish instructor in secondary schools in both Illinois and Michigan, Steve and his wife, Brenda, moved to France in 1985 where they were involved in church planting and helping develop a small French congregation near the city of Lille. Steve concurrently taught English for the Chamber of Commerce. Steve also did extensive baseball coaching in Europe during the family's 13 years overseas, serving for 7 years as technical director and coach of the 120 member Ronchin Baseball Club. He also had a year-long stint as Commissioner of the 11,000 player French Baseball Federation and 3 years as the editor of the European Baseball Report in both French and English.

Steve has taught French, Spanish and English for over 30 years in a variety of capacities - public schools, private schools and in industry, both in the U.S. and in Europe. In addition, he appeared on television for the first time in 2002, teaching Spanish in the Lansing, Michigan area with his ULAT method on TV25. By clicking on the word testimonials, you can read some of the comments made about his work by educators, students and parents.

In 1980, following some initially frustrating and seemingly fruitless years of language teaching, Steve asked God to show him how people learn language, because merely replicating the way in which he himself had been taught in the 1960's had proved disastrous. He gratefully sees the principles on which the ULAT has been built, and the transformation in his own experience as a classroom teacher, from frustration to a deep sense of satisfaction and confidence, as God's answer to that prayer. Over the years, the thrust of his teaching has been to transmit a grasp of world languages without any recourse to the learner's native language. This enables the learner to think in the target language and to express himself with far greater fluency. In large measure, the ULAT is simply a means of recreating in multimedia form what Steve has been doing in the classroom since 1980.