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IN THE company of the liberal arts, introductory foreign language study has often seemed an unequal partner. While the beginning courses in subjects like philosophy, psychology, and literature hold out the opportunity for important intellectual discovery, the early semesters of proficiency-based language study seem aimed at lesser accomplishments, like ordering from menus, buying train tickets, and reading traffic signs—what the profession calls “meeting basic survival needs.” First-year college students, moreover, often set out to learn a second language just at the moment they enter into a more urgent language crisis. Marshaling expanding resources in English, they must rise swiftly to competence in new kinds of precisely formed discourse. This is the moment, especially in the humanities disciplines, when students struggle to carve out an intellectual voice in their native idiom. At such a critical juncture it may seem curiously out of step to repeat childhood ontogeny by learning a new language. Students' mental energies, one might think, ought to be invested in tasks that follow the natural order of cognitive development.
Playing the devil's advocate in this manner may appear to abet those who would eliminate a foreign language requirement from the college curriculum altogether. Not at all! For too long our profession has sought defensively to represent foreign language study as just another general education requirement and to minimize its natural difference from work in other liberal subjects. In actuality, the study of a second language poses a powerful challenge to the entire liberal arts enterprise, because, if done properly, it reveals exactly how fragile, how contingent are the stalks and blooms of the culture we call our own. While this challenge is confrontational and may seem to undermine efforts to build cultural literacy in English, its purpose is transformative—“kerygmatic,” as theologians might say—not destructive. By intentionally exposing the root system of culture, by demonstrating our dependence on language, introductory foreign language, like no other liberal subject, can transform the way we perceive and live culture.
Apologists for foreign languages might therefore argue that this study makes its greatest contribution to liberal disciplines by cutting against the grain of ordinary liberal education to teach the adaptability suited to the fundamental rhythm of learning and surviving: that of passing from the known and risk-free to the unknown and contingent, of periodically beginning anew, of becoming childlike to gain new powers of understanding. Learning a second language, it has long been held, also supports habits of precision and systematic mastery that could under favorable circumstances offer a valuable counterpoint to the often superficial “exposure” given in other liberal subjects. 1 And, according to the familiar geopolitical argument, a global economy and community increasingly require liberally trained citizens who can adapt readily to other languages and cultures—now even more than when the Modern Language Association first sounded this admonitory note in the fifties. In profound ways, foreign language training does indeed seem instrumental to “basic survival.” 2
Genuine partnership between foreign language and liberal studies means grasping how profoundly survival depends on competence in language. But it also means openly acknowledging that foreign languages do not fit the conventional liberal studies mold. If the proficiency movement has done little else, it has brought us finally to face an uncomfortable fact: if a modest degree of foreign language competence were actually to become a serious goal of general education, the time spent on that task in beginning courses would need to increase at least fourfold. 3 The experience of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) shows that students of French or Spanish require some 240 hours, or eight weeks of intensive instruction at about thirty hours a week, to attain the lowest proficiency level, 1/1+, in speaking. At this stage, according to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) guidelines, the learner “can order a simple meal, ask for shelter or lodging, ask and give simple directions, make purchases, and tell time.” Vocabulary remains elementary; errors in pronunciation and grammar still abound. To reach level 1/1+ in German or Russian, moreover, a student might require 480 hours, of sixteen weeks of concentrated instruction. 4
Though FSI programs may be differently paced from college courses, it is reasonable to expect undergraduates to need at least as much instruction and practice time as highly motivated diplomats do to attain comparable levels of proficiency. Instruction for beginning foreign language study in the college schedule, however, commonly amounts to only 80–120 hours a year, at the almost trifling rate of three to five hours a week. 5 With such a low investment of time and effort college students can consider themselves lucky to speak and understand French or Spanish at level 2/2+ at the end of four years of language study, unless they have studied extensively abroad. And only at 2/2+ can learners really be said to have gained both minimally usable skills and an emotional foothold in a new language. 6 Carroll's benchmark 1967 study of college seniors majoring in French, German, Russian, and Spanish revealed that few students exceeded 2/2+ in oral proficiency even after four years.
Despite the gradual evolution in methods of teaching foreign languages, the results would scarcely differ today. Referring to Carroll's earlier research, Valette's recent essay paints an even more distressing picture. “Now, twenty-five years later, it appears that the situation has considerably worsened. Were the profession to carry out a similar large-scale project evaluating the oral proficiency of undergraduate majors, the median score would probably be closer to ‘1+’ (ACTFL Intermediate High)” (325). 7 The MLA-ACLS Language Task Force reported in 1980 that “the typical institutional time schedule—normally three to five fifty-minute sessions weekly…does not provide adequate time for reinforcement and development of skills in language courses” (Brod, Language Study 12). 8 Students who take a year or two of a foreign language to meet a general education requirement should not expect to go beyond the equivalent of level 1, if in fact they reach that.
Ironically, the two major efforts of the last thirty years to revitalize second-language study around the ideal of competency have not only failed to settle the instruction-time issue, they have actually exacerbated it, further driving a wedge between foreign languages and liberal studies. The audiolingual method sought to give language learning integrity and relevance by expanding the scope of study to emphasize speaking and listening, in addition to reading, writing, and grammar. Despite solid success in intensive programs at some institutions, instruction time never increased enough to satisfy the method's voracious appetite for multiskills practice. With the focus shifted to speaking and listening, the most time-consuming skills, the one firm area of engagement with liberal studies, the reading of original texts, began to shrink.
Pedagogy of more recent vintage may offer learners escape from the robotic drills of the audiolingual method, but the accent still falls on oral proficiency, whose demands for instruction and practice remain unchanged and unmet. Schulz observes, “Without question, insufficient time is the major obstacle faced by a proficiency-based program” (“From Achievement” 376). Something like level 1 still marks the outer limit of oral proficiency achieved in the first two years of foreign language study, and when ACTFL proficiency experts undertook to adapt the FSI rating scale to college conditions, they were constrained to split the scale from 0 to 1+ (no skill to minimal skills) into six subincrements better suited to the low-intensity college schedule. The ACTFL generic descriptions for speaking stipulate that at the Intermediate-Mid state (ILR 1) one can “handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated, basic and communicative tasks and social situations,” while at the next highest notch, Intermediate-High (ILR 1+), one is also “able to handle successfully most uncomplicated communicative tasks and social situations” ( ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 1). Even if such microintervals could be differentiated with precision, “proficiency” of this rather limited stripe surely cannot mean much to students. And despite a nod to culture as a fifth proficiency domain, the proficiency agenda does not appear measurably to increase the contribution of foreign languages to liberal study. Requirement-level foreign language skills still remain too low to have more than token application in other disciplines.
Useful application is in fact the goal of a new strategy for breathing life into basic foreign language study: “foreign language across the curriculum” (FLAC). With two years of introductory language behind them, students could continue with FLAC in specially modified (non-foreign language) courses and do a portion of the term's reading and discussion in a foreign language. A course on modern German history, for example, might offer students of German the option of reading excerpts from original texts by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Weber, Nietzsche, and Bismarck in lieu of more extensive assignments in English. Reading original-language sources in these enriched “content” courses would reward students intellectually for earlier travail in required language classes. Their language skills, some FLAC advocates claim, would be enhanced in one-hour weekly discussion sessions. Through authentic texts in content disciplines, FLAC purports to lead foreign languages back into the fellowship of the liberal arts. As musicologists, philosophers, or economists work in teams with foreign language instructors, new channels of communication presumably spring up between them. The National Endowment for the Humanities, moreover, through a program called Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education, has shown an interest in funding FLAC projects. 9
Worthy though FLAC objectives may at first seem, students will lack enough preparation to read significant amounts of unsimplified, unglossed original materials if the reading skill does not receive primary emphasis in requirement-level courses. Level 1+ in reading, the probable fourth-semester limit for a four-skills introductory language program, marks ability to handle “simple connected texts dealing with basic personal and social needs” (ACTFL Intermediate-High, ILR 1+). This achievement is a far cry from reading Luther or Montaigne in the original. Only a handful of students, those few foreign language majors who have studied abroad, could truly benefit from FLAC, for they alone are competent enough—level 2+ (ACTFL Advanced-Plus)—to read and discuss authentic, unedited materials in another language. 10 In short, with the minimal skill levels attainable in current instructional schedules, students will find FLAC a trompe l'oeil: it can deliver only to a select few what it promises to the many; it cannot bridge the gulf between a survival-skills foreign language requirement and meaningful application in liberal studies. The FLAC concept, ironically, would work best if the goal of multiskill proficiency in the beginning courses were abandoned in favor of a reading-centered routine that would develop this single skill. (For a full critical evaluation of FLAC, see Sudermann and Cisar.)
A claim has also been made recently that a new immersion strategy for introductory language study can reestablish a partnership with the liberal arts by providing “intellectually challenging and culturally broadening activities” without compromising students' skill development. In experimental use at the University of Utah, this approach reverses the thrust of proficiency-based teaching and learning by making “content” rather than formal skill acquisition the primary goal. Students are given short newspaper articles or other authentic foreign language selections to read without the benefit of explicit language instruction. Driven by interest in the subject matter and by the need to read and communicate in class, students, it is presumed, will soon acquire foreign language skills sufficient to the task (Sternfeld 342, 343). 11 As used here, the term immersion does not imply increased time on task or concentrated instruction; it means only that the classroom becomes an “occasion for language use,” with the second language serving as the medium of instruction for reading in some other subject—history, current affairs, or culture, for example. In this sense FLAC and the Utah program both give priority to reading and discussing “content” rather than to achieving competency in the target language.
It may be true that students starting a foreign language can absorb a great many phrases and words on a need-to-know basis. In the course of several semesters they may also glean much of interest about social conditions, politics, and popular culture in their language area. This information may further contribute in some preliminary way to liberal studies goals of cultural “literacy.” But the Utah immersion approach seems best suited to interesting students in proceeding to a full-fledged area studies program, where they might come more fully to grips with complex social problems and cultural differences. This objective, of course, begs the question of how they would progress to the advanced use of the second language in such a program without prior systematic training in the language. Though extensive reading practice and a grasp of a language's grammatical structures may not be sufficient to ensure communicative competency, they are surely necessary conditions, and immersion students will inevitably reach a threshold that they cannot cross (Byrnes 178–80). The jury is still out on immersionist philosophy and practice, but it is hard not to take the skeptical view that without formal language instruction and conscious skills practice, Utah immersion students are headed for what Higgs and Clifford call a “terminal 1+.” 12
As long as sturdy foreign language foundations are not laid in the schools, what can be done at the college level to address the need for genuine competency and at the same time to allow foreign language and liberal studies to reinforce each other? Two program strategies suggest themselves as logical alternatives to the traditional fourskills model, with its low-instruction profile. Each meets the need for some form of actual competency. At the same time, both bring language study into phase with liberal study. They are worth mention, even if only to strike a sharp and positive contrast with tenuous initiatives like FLAC and the Utah immersion approach.
“It is possible,” Redfield observes, “as I know from experience, to teach students to read Homer accurately and sensitively in a year of ordinary course-work…” (8). His observation forms the basis for the first approach, a reading- and language-centered program for a four-semester requirement. The virtues of such a strategy recommend it: it fits comfortably into conventional instruction schedules and general education requirements; it supports the study of authentic texts, the crux of education in the humanities; it singles out reading skills for rapid development, enabling students of most languages to reach the critical 2+ level by the end of the fourth semester and making FLAC feasible as a postrequirement stage of foreign language application. 13 Many students, finally, find reading texts in the original language deeply satisfying.
Déjà-vu this is not. Progressive and proficiency-oriented in its methods, the new reading model could also provide students with a broader understanding of the nature of language, of the relation between language and culture, and of the ways language families have developed historically; contrasts between English and the foreign language could be highlighted; grammatical rules would receive more satisfying linguistic explanation (see Durham's strong support of an approach that gives students insight into the nature of language). In the third and fourth terms the accent might shift more to the rhetorical, logical, and literary uses of language. What is described here resembles in part the reading-oriented Saint John's College Language Tutorial, “a present-day restoration” of the trivium ( Catalog 11).
In stressing both proficiency in reading and the phenomenon of language as expressed in a particular language, this strategy makes a readily defensible contribution to traditional (text-oriented) liberal study. Further, while students who complete a two-year requirement are guaranteed a usable level of proficiency, the value of this sort of language study does not rest solely on the prospect of using it later as a tool, as in FLAC. The arts of language, and to a lesser extent the interpretive arts, themselves become the content and form the spine of these courses, giving language study firm humanities support. Far from marking a return to an earlier state of affairs, the teaching of reading would draw heavily on recent advances in content-based instruction and the pedagogy of reading. 14 Even in reading-centered language study, however, speaking and listening would by no means be eliminated. And for students who wished to go beyond a general education requirement to develop a full palette of language skills at level 2/2+ and beyond, intensive programs—especially when followed immediately by study abroad—would still offer the best solution to the instruction-time problem. In fact, a reading focus for beginning language study may be justified only if intensive work and study abroad are also available as a second track. 15
The second strategy offers a horse cure as simple as it is effective. It would not only permanently solve the problem of instruction time but also anchor the connection between foreign language and liberal studies in reinforced concrete. Low-intensity language courses would be scrapped at the outset in favor of an immersion-style intensive program incorporating 500 to 1000 or more hours of multiskill instruction (depending on the difficulty of the language). But 500 hours amounts to at least a full third of the total needed for a BA degree, and a commitment of this magnitude to a single subject would wreak havoc with the delicate ecology of requirements that regulates general education in most colleges.
The creation of a discrete “foreign language year,” situated between the freshman and sophomore or the sophomore and junior levels, removes this obstacle in a dramatically conclusive way. The foreign language year would feature intensive training along the lines of the model successfully used for several decades by the Foreign Service and Defense Language Institutes. Students would be involved some six hours of language activities daily, combined with two to three hours of private study, five days a week. For most languages this preparation would bring 2/2+ skills into reach in twelve months or less. 16 During the year ancillary study in history, politics, economics, anthropology, religion, literature, and culture—some in English, some in the foreign language—would help shape the cultural, historical, and social context for the intensive language work. A sizable portion of the year, or even the entire year, could be spent abroad.
A bold project of this sort would put genuine second-language competence and bicultural understanding at the very heart of undergraduate education; it would draw many of the liberal arts into direct interdisciplinary play. Concentrating basic foreign language study in one year also has the advantage of clearing the way for more rigorous and undiluted liberal study during the remaining four years. The first year or two might even be devoted to an integrated core curriculum. In the last two years, advanced students could apply their foreign language expertise in FLAC-enhanced courses, and they could assist as student apprentices in language courses. Majors might even shoot for level 3/3+ proficiency. Few would ask, “Where's the beef?”
Practical concerns dictate that a foreign language year be an option rather than a general education requirement. Certain incentives might, however, make it an increasingly popular option for undergraduates. As a well-earned mark of distinction, students who make this choice would receive a special five-year degree, a BASL—bachelor of arts with second-language competency—rather than the customary BA. Professional and graduate schools would favor, and perhaps actively recruit, applicants with this kind of training and degree. The cost of a fifth year of college for qualified and interested students could be underwritten by a program of nationally funded foreign language scholarships. These stipends would serve the national interest well, since they would also encourage the study of less commonly taught, but nationally important, languages. The teaching of rarely offered languages could be consolidated at regional institutes and thus made more cost-effective. Students wishing to learn Thai or Albanian, for example, would take a year's leave from their home college or university to enroll for their foreign language year in an institute offering that language.
At first blush, the foreign language year sounds unabashedly utopian. Yet Fulbright awards have for decades given BA graduates the opportunity to spend a year studying abroad before entering graduate school. For undergraduates at Macalester College, a new program in Japanese incorporates within a four-year schedule many of the strengths of the foreign language year. In their first year of Japanese, students receive 250 hours of instruction. During the fall term and the interim period of the second year, they study in Japan. There they continue to learn the language through a series of activities that engage them in Japanese daily life, culture, and history. They also undertake a self-designed humanities project. On returning to Macalester in the spring, they enroll in a follow-up course intended to consolidate their new knowledge and prepare them for “serious humanities studies.” These include FLAC options in film, literature, and history during their junior and senior years. Those completing the program are expected to reach at least level 2 proficiency, and they may put their Japanese skills to use mentoring less advanced students and engaging in other noncurricular language activities. The Macalester program replaces existing introductory and intermediate Japanese courses, but participants remain nonmajors, since the college does not offer a degree in Japanese. Eighty students currently enroll in three levels of Japanese instruction. 17
This essay directly confronts the predicament of foreign languages in a liberal arts setting. If first- and second-year courses continue to produce low-level multiskill proficiency, then foreign language study will continue to find itself the odd subject out among the competing interests that make up general education. The introductory stages of other humanities require substantially less time and effort for greater intellectual return. Innovatives strategies, like FLAC and the Utah immersion approach, intended to bridge the gap between lower-level foreign language courses and liberal studies do not remedy the situation. Without 500 hours or more of basic instruction, language students do not develop the skills for advanced application. There is no clever reversal of priorities, no pedagogical sleight of hand, that can substitute for adequate instruction time. Only two alternatives, both radical in certain respects, can make foreign language study a full partner in liberal education. If the beginning stages must conform to a traditional low-intensity schedule, then the focus of requirement-level courses should perhaps narrow to a single skill, that of reading, to ensure the 2+ proficiency needed for substantive application. The ideal alternative, on the other hand, bilingual language competency, cannot be realized without an extraordinary increase in foreign language instruction and second-culture exposure: an extra year of undergraduate study combined with study abroad. The price of full partnership between the foreign languages and the other liberal arts is steep, but the gains would be high for both partners.
David P. Sudermann is an independent scholar. He has taught linguistics, language, and humanities core curricula at Pacific Lutheran University and Saint Olaf College.
1 This logic, in fact, underlies the language tutorial at Saint John's College: “The rapid reading for the [great books] seminar, with its attention to the large outlines and to the general trend and development of the central idea, is supplemented and corrected by a more precise and analytical study [in Greek and French], one which is concerned with particular details and shades of meaning and with the abstract logical structure and rhetorical pattern of a given work” (12). Saint John's students study two years each of Greek and French.
Redfield suggests that the ideology of exposure has infiltrated even language teaching through “beautifully crafted textbooks, workbooks, tapes, and even interactive videotapes” that may be only partially effective. As a result, the “exposed student is likely in another sense later to be exposed. The inability to see the point of a poem is a failing that in ordinary life can usually be concealed, but an inability to speak or read French becomes at certain moments painfully obvious…” (7). Redfield here echoes a theme in Brod's Language Study (10).
2 “Survival” in the profound sense of a full encounter with cultural contingency bears further development as a rationale for foreign language study. See Eble's plea for a strategy of teaching and learning that aims at the survival of human communities (96–102). See also the now classic 1956 manifesto of the MLA Steering Committee for FL Policy (xxiv). Here I intend briefly to outline an argument for and against foreign languages learning in relation to liberal study, not to provide an overview of typical rationales for acquiring a second language. For several articles presenting political and economic reasons for learning a foreign language, see the Spring 1981 issue of the ADFL Bulletin , especially the report of the National Task Force on Education and the World View.
3 Of course, pursuing such a goal would drastically reduce the time available for other subjects and dramatically raise the number of “service courses” the foreign language faculty would need to teach.
4 The Foreign Service Institute table relating instruction time to proficiency levels (1973) is reprinted in Schulz (“From Achievement” 378–79). The FSI scale is now commonly referred to as the ILR Proficiency Scale. The above definitions of the various speaking proficiency stages in the ILR system are found in Higgs (224).
5 “Instruction” includes not only formal classroom training but also supervised language laboratory work, practice sessions with student apprentices, and other supervised informal exposure to the foreign language. The instruction-time problem was also highlighted in the 1956 MLA Steering Committee report (xvii–xix). See also Brod, “Building” (11).
6 My own experience in learning and teaching several languages suggests that after about 480 hours of traditional study, or sometime after the sixth semester, the satisfactions of using the language overtake the effort and discomfort of learning it. Though this claim is admittedly subjective, the generic descriptions of what students can do at ILR 2/2+ (ACTFL Advanced/Advanced-Plus) tend to support it. Laufer and Sim found that only students who had crossed a threshold of about Advanced-Plus could “cope with an academic text of the nature they were tested on (not perfectly, but well enough)” (408).
7 Valette, however, does not point to lack of instruction time as a probable cause of 1+ “fossilization.” She bases her claim in part on a finding she attributes to Savignon but reports in her own words: “about one-third of the French majors at the University of Illinois had an oral proficiency rating at the ‘1 to 1+’ level” (325). In a recent exchange of letters in the Modern Language Journal's “Readers' Forum,” Savignon corrects this finding by saying that oral proficiency evaluation of teacher-education majors in French showed “that graduates with an extended immersion experience, e.g., a year of study abroad, are more likely than their classmates to attain a 2/2+ rating, but these data are limited.” They do not apply to the oral competency of French majors overall at Urbana. Valette accepts the qualification but notes that some language majors at her institution graduate at the 1/1+ level.
8 In a more recent review of foreign language pedagogy, Patrikis asserts, “Even four semesters of classes meeting five hours a week does not provide a student with a functional knowledge of an ‘easy’ language like Spanish, let along a ‘hard’ language like Japanese.” Further, “No amount of testing and measuring will alter the fact that the current structure of academic work does not normally provide the opportunity for intensive and deep study of a foreign language…” (27–28).
9 The NEH has recently funded FLAC efforts at Saint Olaf College (1989) (Moline; Watkins), the University of Minnesota (1990), Pacific Lutheran University (1992), and Macalester College (1992). The Saint Olaf program repeats in essential aspects an earlier NEH-funded FLAC experiment at Earlham College (Jurasek, “Practical Applications,” “Integrating,” “Languages”; Jurasek and Jurasek). On FLAC see also Straight; Allen, Anderson, and Narváez.
10 In a study of adults learning English, Laufer and Sim, as noted above, found the equivalent of ACTFL Advanced-Plus, or ILR 2+, in overall second-language proficiency to be the “threshold” below which students cold not effectively read an academic (405–11).
11 The Utah program is based on Canadian immersion experience for schoolchildren learning French or English as a second language.
12 “The terminal 1+ has usually learned the foreign language on the streets. Street learners do not need accurate grammar to survive. As a result, they develop and internalize their own communication strategies. Even though most of these strategies are not linguistically correct, they succeed for Level 1 tasks. They do not, however, work at higher functional levels, when more sophisticated communicative tasks are attempted. This means that these inaccurate strategies, which normally consist of fossilized lexical and grammatical structures, have to be unlearned before functional language ability can be improved…. Remediation in these cases is seldom, if ever, successful” (Higgs and Clifford 67).
13 I have found no studies that compare reading proficiency in a reading-focused program with that in a standard four-skills curriculum. Indeed, proficiency testing of reading remains a problem. Level 2 in four semesters is an estimate based on what I have found possible in reading-centered Latin and Greek courses. Four semesters might not suffice to reach 2+ in reading languages like Chinese and Russian.
14 According to Crane, the arts of language comprise “the many and varied techniques we have for dealing with the symbolic media in which [human] achievements…are embodied or through which they reach us, from grammar in the ordinary sense, through prosody, rhetoric, the simpler parts of logic, and textual criticism, to the refinements of modern general linguistics” (9).
For background on recent reading pedagogy see the important articles by Byrnes (172–78); Schulz (“From Word”), and Jurasek and Jurasek. Byrnes notes, “Given the fact that…expressive language skills are more difficult than interpretive skills to develop to a truly usable level and that American curricular realities frequently simply do not provide for the necessary length of study, it is only appropriate to consider placing greater emphasis on the interpretive skills. To focus on reading, in particular, among these skills is by no means a novel approach. On the contrary, the argument that American learners are much more likely to continue future involvement with the language through reading than through any of the other skill areas is well-established and, for many, exceeding convincing” (173).
15 Advocacy of intensive programs as a regular curricular option was a recurring theme in foreign language policy essays throughout the seventies and eighties. See, for example, Schulz (“Searching”). For a model intensive program see Jurasek (“Intensive”).
16 According to the FSI table, students of group 1 languages (e.g., French and Spanish) might need 480–720 hours of instruction (16–24 weeks) to reach level 2/2+. For group 2 languages (e.g., German, Greek, and Hindi) the required instruction time might approach or exceed 720 hours (24–44 weeks). For group 3 languages (e.g., Russian and Hebrew), the range is 720–1,320 hours (24–44 weeks). Students of group 4 languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) usually require 1,320 or more hours (44 weeks) to reach level 2/2+ (Schulz, “From Achievement” 379). In concentrated learning of this type, formal classroom instruction needs to be balanced with informal activities. For daily schedules of a workable and humane sort see Troiani and Kessler.
17 The NEH supports the Macalester program. My thanks go to the program's director, Phyllis Larson, for extensively briefing me on the project.
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© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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