A Look at ASTP as Student and Teacher

Abstract

T HE arguments for and against the intensive language method developed for the Army Specialized Training Program have filled not only pages and pages of our professional journals; they have also spread into the popular magazines. The interesting thing to me about all these articles is that I have not yet seen one written by a teacher who himself had studied a new language by the ASTP method. Perhaps my having studied two languages and taught two others according to ASTP principles may justify my throwing this additional fuel on the flames of ASTP controversy. In the spring of 1944 I was lent by one of the American voluntary relief agencies to UNRRA for a year's service as a relief worker in the UNRRA Balkan Mission. Before going overseas I studied both Modern Greek and Serbo-Croatian by the ASTP method for two months at the UNRRA Training Center, near Washington, where the texts for those two languages, since published by Henry Holt and Company, were written and first tried out. Each language was under the supervision of an American trained in linguistics; classes were limited to eight students each with a native speaker as a guide; and the classes met for two hours a day. After only twelve of the thirty lesson units that are included in the regular ASTP courses I left for Egypt, spending the next ten months in work among some 25,000 Yugoslav refugees in an UNRRA camp on the Egyptian desert. Proof of the value of those twelve lessons of Serbo-Croatian lies in the fact that after two months among the Yugoslavs I carried on all my daily business in Serbo-Croatian without an interpreter, and within another month I myself had begun to serve as an occasional interpreter for the British commandant of the camp in which I worked! Since returning to the United States last summer I have been using the original ASTP textbook in one Spanish class and a civilian adaptation of the method in first-year French. Now, what is so new or different about the ASTP method? To judge by the articles describing it in the popular magazines you would think nobody had ever taught foreign languages properly before the War Department took over. On the other hand, many of the articles in our professional journals give the impression that, apart from the greatly increased number of hours in class, the reduction in the size of classes, the rigid selection of students and a special wartime motivation, ASTP contained nothing that successful teachers had not been doing all along.