04, no. 3 (March 1973): 5-6
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A MULTILINGUAL AMERICA: THE CONTINUING CHALLENGE
Robert Streeter
SINCE THE TIME a century and a half ago when Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, hung out his shingle as a professor of Italian in New York City, American education has maintained a love-hate (or perhaps a yearning-frustration) relationship with the teaching of the modern foreign languages.
Liberated from the cozy geography and intertwining national traditions of Western Europe, American students have seldom felt the bread-and-butter urgency of mastering French, German, or Russian. Monolingual America could stand in splendid isolation from the Tower of Babel across the water.
This provincialism was not of course unique to the Americans. Emerson noted Britain's insularity, in the heyday of its power, and told the story of an English lady on the Rhine hearing a German speaking of her party as foreigners, and exclaiming, “No, we are not foreigners; we are English; it is you that are foreigners.”
During this last 25 years this attitude of cultural separatism coupled with linguistic innocence has been swept away. World War II projected millions of Americans into alien cultures, European and Asian. Since the war, international activities in government, business, science, and culture have burgeoned. Extended foreign travel and residence abroad have become commonplace experiences for young Americans.
A Parallel Development
This outward movement was paralleled by an explosion in the teaching of foreign languages. During World War II the military services began massive foreign language training programs, making heavy use of oral-aural techniques, native speakers as informants, and concentrated periods of instruction. These approaches were promptly adapted to postwar instruction in the schools and colleges.
Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and awareness of America's international position accelerated the surge in foreign language programs. Post-Sputnik concern with the quality of American education was felt most strongly in the sciences and mathematics, but it also spilled over into the upgrading of foreign language instruction.
The Modern Language Association developed an aggressive and comprehensive program for the improvement of language teaching. Following the European model, many elementary schools introduced languages into their upper years. With Federal funding under the National Defense Education Act, special institutes undertook to broaden the knowledge and improve the skills of teachers already at work. Students were encouraged to concentrate on achieving real control of a single foreign language instead of a smattering of several. This was a time of great ferment in linguistic science, and the findings of modern linguistics were invoked in support of curricular innovation. From the humble tape-recorder to lavishly equipped laboratories, technology was enlisted in the cause of teaching young Americans to speak and listen like Italians or Russians.
Curricular Expansion
Along with this effort to improve instruction in the languages, chiefly those of Western Europe traditionally taught in the United States, came a vast curricular expansion into new territory. The emergence of area studies as an educational concept generated a need for regular instruction in the so-called “exotic” languages that had been the preserve of a few specialists—Tamil, Turkish, Thai, and scores of others. Federal and foundation support played a major role in opening up these new language areas. Much of this work was concentrated in the graduate schools, but as scholar-teachers have been trained some of the more common non-Western languages have made their way into the curricula of many colleges and a few secondary schools.
From this summary account it might appear that the educational problems of language instruction have all been satisfactorily solved, and that we have finally banished the native American attitude evoked by Mark Twain when he has Jim remark to Huck Finn that, if a Frenchman is a man, “Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man?”
However, as the builder of the Tower of Babel discovered some time ago, know-how is not enough. There are signs that despite the professional expertise and curricular richness that now characterize foreign language programs, many students choose not to speak with two tongues. The expanding enrollments of the late nineteen-fifties and sixties have leveled off, and many colleges have eliminated or reduced the formal language requirements for graduation.
In the loosening-up of curricular requirements that has occurred on many campuses in recent years, the vulnerability of the foreign languages was to be expected. Even under the best teaching, mastering a foreign language requires hard slogging work and the capacity to look beyond the tedium to the outcome. To modify a phrase from Hobbes, the process may seem nasty, brutish, and not short enough. Unless a student has an interest in the structure of language, or in the broader cultural knowledge that control of the language offers to him, he is unlikely to cherish the discipline for its own sake.
In the heady excitement over the new technology of language instruction, it was often overlooked that the oral-aural approach, with its heavy emphasis upon repetitive acts of speaking and listening, required a virtuoso teacher who could relate the acquisition of a skill to significant educational concern. Program med instruction directed by a programmed teacher leads to programmed boredom. Only a teacher who is alive to important issues either in linguistics or in the culture of the language he is teaching can provide the motivation needed to fuel the concentrated study that, at bottom, learning a new language entails.
The revolution in modern language instruction has been won. The myth of the monolingual American has receded into educational history. As one of my language-teaching colleagues remarked the other day, we have proved that one does not need to be a Hungarian to speak two languages.
What confronts the modern language faculties today is the important task of consolidating the clear gains of recent years by linking these newly forged language skills with humanistic learning, with the total curriculum, with the general intellectual life of the individual student.
Speaking of the development of the telegraph system, Thoreau asked, “What has Maine to say to Texas?” It is still a fair question to ask about any advance in communication.
Reprinted from the New York Times 8 January 1973, by permission. © The New York Times Company, 1973. Dr. Streeter is Professor of English and Dean of the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago.
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 04, no. 3 (March 1973): 5-6 |
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