Modern Language Teaching: Stagnation Since the War

"Harvard is no place to learn a foreign language." With this terse statement, a teaching fellow in an elementary Italian class here expressed a view which has become prevalent among faculty and student alike at Harvard. But the statement of this teaching fellow might also be expanded to read, "A college is no place to learn a foreign language."

This, a major academic problem, affects Harvard crucially, for this university has gained the reputation of sustained leadership in almost all fields of college study. But, in the words of Professor Wilbur M. Frohock, chairman of the Romance Languages department, "In advances and in the teaching of elementary languages, Harvard is following and not leading." A recent survey by the Chicago Tribune would seem to back Frohock's statement. Whereas Harvard was chosen as the top college in the country, seven out of its 28 major fields were labelled as "undistinguished." French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Linguistics were five of these.

450 Don't Pass Requirement

This College is behind and it cannot afford to be. It has a language requirement and its stated academic policy is that no student shall be allowed to graduate from here until he has passed this requirement. Some 450 freshmen entered the Class of '60 without having passed their language test and it then became Harvard's job to teach them or let them fall by the wayside. It may be foolish, as many feel, to impose a language requirement on college students who may be particularly inept at such study and who will be saddled with these elementary courses when they could be moving into higher academic brackets in other fields. The reasoning behind this is similar to that of Frohock, who maintains "I've never known an educated man who didn't know at least two languages."

The college language teacher's idea of utopia would be when a student came out of secondary school knowing two languages and entered college either to start on a third or to perfect his writing in the second. But this utopia will be long in coming, for the colleges now are doing the work of the secondary schools in teaching students elementary languages. There are some schools which have no language program at all whereas others give their pupils only an antiquated start in French or Spanish and see them come to grief in the College Board Exams. Until the secondary schools improve their language teaching to a far higher extent or until colleges stiffen their admissions policy, it will be the latter's function to teach a good percentage of their students a foreign language.

A college may not be the best place to learn a new language or more specifically, to pass one's language requirement; other institutions have realized this and have started to do something about it. "Certain other forward looking universities, such as Cornell and Columbia were doing seven years ago what we are doing now," Frohock points out.

Harvard Hasn't Kept Up

Harvard is behind because it never kept up. "We did not take advantages of the lessons learnt in World War II," Frohock says, "while such colleges as Cornell, Wesleyan, and Princeton did." Cornell, for instance, has an ambitious new program of language teaching which it started experimentation on as early as 1946. The question then must be: why did Harvard allow itself to become stagnated in an ivy-encrusted system first instituted by some English private school headmaster when it became evident that there were quicker and more efficient ways of learning a language?

The answer is not as evident as it may seem. It is a fact that until two years ago, the language departments at Harvard had allowed themselves to stagnate simply because, as Edward Geary, coordinator of Languages puts it, "no one had ever taken the trouble before." But besides this obvious answer, there is one other somewhat nebulous reason for the college's emphasis on old systems. Harvard's approach to language teaching has always been on the "literary" level. That is to say, when a professor was teaching a class how to speak French, he was really teaching his students about France. The goal of any elementary language course here was to teach the student how to read the language, both so he could delve into the literature and the culture of the particular tongue, and more specifically so (if he still had to) he could pass the college board, which is primarily a reading test.

But since the war, there has been a new movement. During World War II, when the government had to teach men French, German, Italian and other languages and had to teach them in a hurry, it was found that a far greater emphasis on actual speaking of the language was particularly effective. Tape recorders were pressed into use and men taught foreign languages by actual imitation of the sounds that they heard coming over the tape. When the war ended, Cornell was the first college to pick up this idea, using it on an experimental basis. By 1950 it had proved itself so successful that it was made the permanent method. As a result, Cornell has the most modern, if not the most successful language program in the country. The language is completely separated from the culture and no student is encouraged to read the literature of his particular language, as literature, until he has gained a thorough speaking knowledge.

Harvard, while recognizing the merits of this system, is not willing to go this far. "We are planning more and more emphasis on speaking," Frohock says, "but the fact remains that while my barber may speak French better than I do, he hasn't got a single intelligent thing to say in it. For myself, speaking is only important, because it helps you to learn to write the language." The Romance Language Department's plans for the next few years then definitely do include a new emphasis on oral teaching, but not to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual element.

Frohock points out that the department initiated last year modern methods in the elementary French courses: French R and French A. Geary is using the "direct method" of language teaching, i.e. from the moment the student steps into the classroom, he hears nothing but French. This system is designed to surround the student with an environment, so dominated by the language, that he absorbs it by osmosis, in the same fashion that he learned his own language. "It is still too early to tell how it is working out," Geary comments, "but it has worked at Cornell and there is no reason it should not work here." One teaching fellow in French R comments that "there is a prejudice against the direct method of language teaching here, for it is not intellectual enough for the intellectual Harvard students. But we will have results even if the students themselves don't like it."

"Machine System" Used

Another facet of the new methods now being employed here is the use of the "machine system" (tape recorders). "We are starting this in one of our elementary French courses," Frohock notes, "but we are far behind such colleges as Wesleyan and Columbia. They have many of these essential practice laboratories, we have only one which has just been started this year." Professors Henry Hatfield and Harry Levin are not quite so enthusiastic on the subject of tape recorders, the former remarking that "we haven't gone overboard on machines, but we are waiting to see how they work out. This is a pilot experiment." Geary and Frohock hope to institute the use of machines and modern methods into the intermediate courses within the near future, for they feel the situation here is even worse than in the elementary courses. "By the time, a student gets to his second year," Geary comments, "he is often sick and tired of languages. We should give them more differentiated courses at this level."

The emphasis, then, is to be on increased speaking and oral work in elementary classes first, and then later in the intermediate courses. Raimundo Lido, professor of Romance Languages and Literature, agrees that more oral work is vitally needed in elementary teaching. "The epitome of reading is speaking the language; from there you must go on to the ultimate step in facile writing."

The next problem that confronts the Harvard elementary language teacher is the question of time: "This Monday-Wednesday-Friday strait jacket," one instructor feels, "is particularly injurious to the study of an elementary language. We need continuity in our teaching process, and somewhat the same setup as the scientific courses enjoy would be a good answer." Last year, for the first time, an elementary language course was allowed four hours a week--German A. This new course was quite popular and the "Aural-Oral" (Cornell) method of teaching is proving to be a success. "There is no guarantee that we'll stop at 4 hours a week," a section man said, "but in the event that we don't, we'd pare down the homework."

Over 3 Hours Weekly

Frohock agrees that the departments need more than 3 hours a week. "This is one of the reasons we are behind the other colleges," he adds. "Columbia has 5 hours a week, Wesleyan has six, and Princeton has six." In the accelerated Cornell system, the elementary language student spends eight hours a week studying languages, three in a "drill section," three in the lab, and two in lecture. These courses, however, count for double credit.

There is some sentiment in the faculty to accelerate a first year language course to the extent that Cornell has, the result being that the student would be able to pass his language requirement at the end of his first year (provided he had had little or no training in high school). According to Geary, the best year the Language department has had to date was 1955 when 30% of the first year students passed their language requirement at the end of their first year. It is then possible that, if the accelerated course were put in, a far larger percentage would pass the test. If this proved to be the case, it seems doubtful that such a course will be instituted here for some time to come. There is good reason to expect that the students themselves would greatly resent eight hours a week learning to say, "Passez La Beurre," even if the chances were good for their getting through in one year. What about the existing intensive courses? Chinese Aab, Slavic Aab, Mongolian, Japanese, etc.?

There is then the question of who is to teach these courses. The majority of the faculty teaching elementary courses are graduate students working for their Ph.D. (often in some totally unrelated course to the language they are teaching). As Francis M. Rogers, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, points out, "Everytime we find a particularly good elementary teacher, he just gets picked off to be a section man in French 20 or some other upper-level course. The result is that the elementary teaching never gets above a certain level."

Half-Way Solution

Hatfield points out that some advancement has been made in the reading of German; on two separate occasions, teaching fellows gained promotions on the basis of their ability in elementary courses rather than by seniority or by academic accomplishments. But this is only a half-way solution. The teacher in the lower level course will then work as hard as he can to get his promotion but the fact may also be that if he gets the promotion, he can get out of teaching the elementary course and enter a more challenging field. The problem then remains--how to keep a steady flow of willing and able teachers.

Cornell's system here is one of the highlights of its Language department and one that Harvard may well copy. Every one of the drill sessions, which consist of ten students each, is taught by a native of the country whose language is being taught. These teachers are all graduate students who work off a percentage of their tuition by leading these small classes. These graduate students are even rotated from class to class so that the students will not learn to mimic one particular type of accent in the language they are studying.

There is no reason this system would not work here as the University has a wealth of foreign graduate students to choose from who would probably be quite willing to teach (or supervise) a class in their own native tongue. This system, however, is only effective in a class run by the direct method, and the college would have to revamp some of its courses to satisfy this.

Another possible solution to this problem being considered by the Romance Languages Department is a part-time teacher system which is really little more than an extension of the present setup. The only ramification would be a separate course for those teaching fellows who want to go into elementary teaching.

Rogers, who vehemently opposes the Cornell method of learning languages (i.e. machines, separation from culture), says that "We must reward the younger men. They must have an in- terest in the country whose language they are teaching." When these men move on to higher levels, Rogers advocates a system of rotation, whereby every faculty member, regardless of rank, will be required to teach an elementary course for a specific amount of time. The quality of teaching would then be raised and the teaching fellows would not be mired in the lower levels.

Harvard then must find some workable solution to this essential problem or fall even further behind. A new theory now gaining acceptance is that the best elementary language teacher is a native of the country on which the course is focused. Such a man has a better insight into the language and will often do a better job than an American scholar twice his age.

The most important problem facing this college when it has to teach a student an elementary foreign language is a dilemma that is not Harvard's alone; it is the problem of every college in the country that teaches a foreign language. It is a simple matter of will.

In the case of the student, by the time he reaches college age and unless he is contemplating a career in the foreign service or in the Berlitz school, he feels that going through the routine steps of learning another language is nothing but a crashing bore. If I really want to learn another language, he can say, I can go over to France or Germany, spend a summer there, and by the time I get back, I will be able to speak rings around my less fortunate companions in French R.

The truth is that he is right. If the student has already passed his language requirement, then of course, he has no problem. He can either drop languages altogether and take up applied nuclear physics or instead, if he is interested, he