Who Wants to Speak a Foreign Language? K. J. Fickert The German Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3. (May, 1954), pp. 159-162. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-8831%28195405%2927%3A3%3C159%3AWWTSAF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F The German Quarterly is currently published by American Association of Teachers of German.

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http://www.jstor.org Sun Jun 3 22:47:51 2007

WHO WANTS TO SPEAK A FOREIGN LANGUAGE?

Language teachers have fallen victim to their own worst enemies. They have bowed low (under pressure) to the educational theorists who demand that all teaching be directed toward pr(actica1ends. The argument goes that modern foreign languages can have practical application (or euphemistically speaking can " come alive ") only when they are spoken. If a student cannot ask how to get to the railroad station in the language he is studying, he has gained nothing but his college credits. The first question that arises in my mind is whether language teachers, in their efforts to reestablish the importance of foreign language study, are letting themselves be guided by the right people. Those who present the slogan "education for pr,actical living" have no real interest in foreign languages. They pointed out long ago that for the American student foreign languages are superfluous; that anything worthwhile written in a foreign language has been translated into English (ask any psychologist) ; that, furthermore, all policemen and taxi-drivers in foreign countries speak English.

A short time ago the educators who erased the "liberal" from liberal education and wrote in "practical" would not have cared to advise foreign Language teachers in anything but a hasty exit. There has lately been added to their horizon and vocabulary that weighty phrase "the role of the United States in world affairs." They have progressed to the view that foreign languages themselves are not worthless but the people who teach them and their methods are. The educators who have made this analysis of the situation are setting the course for foreign language study. They have extended their prejudices to take in the field of foreign languages. They propose making a Berlitz out of every university. I think that those who insist that each student in a foreign language possess a speaking knowledge of that language ,are not the proper guides because, above all, their program is not feasible.

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I am assuming that the standard course in a foreign language at an American college or university consists of three hours of instruction per week and a year's study involves, more or less, ninety hours of direct contact with the foreign language. (There is no question of doubting the efficacy of a program which involves the student almost exclusively in foreign language study over a period of several months, such as the program of the Middlebury Summer School.) Ninety hours suggest the picture of some seven full days of acquaintance with a foreign language. Nor does the student spend his seven days with twenty Germans or Frenchmen, rather with twenty other Americans, among whom a lone voice cries out in mystic numbers, "How do I get to the railroad station?" The problem of foreign language study a t the college level should be left in the hands of the foreign language teachers. Kot one of them would deny the desirability of having students learn to speak a foreign language. There have always been conversation courses in foreign languages. For a language teacher the practical aspect of foreign language teaching has always been how to make anything worthwhile out of a brief brush with a foreign language. The general aim has been, if I may speak for some old fogies who teach foreign languages, to teach a foreign language as a system of communication (the aim is to give the student the formula before asking him to make the experiment) and then to suggest the wealth of material which the language has to communicate. I n bold and ugly words: grammar and reading. A language teacher may analyze the situation, upon meeting a first year class of twenty members, in this way: of twenty students about fifteen will encounter the foreign language rarely if at all, once the classroom is left behind. These students can appreciate a foreign language only as an experience. I t can be a great experience, such as music is a great experience even to those who think a diatonic scale is something found in a bathroom. If fifteen students can learn to appreciate that there exist, let us say in the German language, novels of great distinction, a wealth of philosophic writings, article after article on profound scientific subjects (they haven't all been translated), and these fifteen students have it in their power to become acquainted with any of this material, according to their tastes and leisure, then fifteen students have

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gotten something out of a course in a foreign language. They have also learned something about the German people, friend or enemy. There will be in the class five students who will need and make use of a speaking knowledge of the language. They will not be ignored. Together with the other members of the class they will learn how to pronounce and how to read and how to say the things that are conventionally said in a language. However, they will learn to implement these pat phrases only when they go on to a conversation course. Then it is that they will proceed from the "Gesegnete Mahlzeit" through the whole menu. The outcry in favor of teaching foreign languages to produce speaking knowledge of them has not been voiced by the educational theorists alone. Foreign language teachers have been feeling the whip from another direction. I t is, of course, the students themselves who think they want to learn to speak a foreign language. They don't want gr,ammar; they don't want long assignments for translation. They want conversation. Going back to that beginning class in a foreign language, I venture to say that out of twenty students perhaps five will retain their interest after ten sessions of repetitious question and answer and after they have memorized the first fifty pattern sentences. Why has it become acceptable to allow students to decide what they should be taught and how they should be taught it 7 The thought was once that settling these problems was the function of the faculty to whom was attributed a greater intelligence in these affairs.

In preparing for the coming renaissance in the study of foreign languages in American universities, teachers have been too willing to admit they were wrong and to bow to the judgment of the group that was wrong in the first place, that years ago decreed that there was no point (nothing practical) in learning foreign languages. Teachers have also assumed that because some students "soured7' on a foreign language, there was something wrong with the subject, particularly with the way it was taught. The alternate conclusion in the face of student dissatisfaction, which teachers evidently and administrators surely hate to face, is that occasionally complaining students have no aptitude for a subject, no matter how you slice it. The groups from subject areas outside of foreign languages who now are willing to tolerate foreign languages, if they are taught

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on a practical level, do not appreciate how impractical their view of the situation is, nor would they agree to a program in foreign languages which would monopolize a student's time for two or three semesters but which might make a program aimed at attaining speaking ability in foreign languages feasible. There are few educators on the sidelines and few students who realize that learning to speak n. foreign language in fifty-minute sessions for a very short time is learning language the hard way. Thus it seems to me that this might be a time to pause in the face of the pressure brought to bear on foreign language teachers to turn foreign language courses into the equivalent of a pocket-size Howto-Speak manual. Is it too lat,e for the question: Have foreign language teachers been wrong in their devotion to foreign language as a field of study (like History, like Chemistry, like English) 7 Is there nothing to be said for the aim of teaching a student how to read a foreign language and how to appreciate what he is reading; is there nothing living in a language but "How do I get to the railroad station ? "

Florida State University, Tallaitassee