“Life‐Like” or “Old‐Fashioned” Foreign Language Teaching?

Abstract

ONE of the important questions posed at the 1944 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish was this: Though the results of the 'life-like' methods are at the moment more brilliant, will they be more lasting than those of the 'old-fashioned grammar-composition'? The question could not be fully discussed at the meeting. However, it was suggested that only time could be the ultimate judge in testing the validity of the new methods compared with the one. The suggestions seems to me rather unfortunate for it encourages a wait and see attitude, while the issue can be cleared without delay in the light of selfevidence and experience. the first place, the determining principle of the so-called new methods, being derived from life, is as old as life itself. Ever since Genesis all the people on earth have learned at least one language by this principle. the second place, long before the Army Specialized Training Program, lifelike methods were known and practiced under various forms and names by teachers to whom the foreign language meant not only a mere theory of a subject but a living tongue. Their true motto has always been In the beginning was the Word and their primary effort always to focus the student's mind on the spoken foreign language, thus promoting, vividly and intensely, the assimilation of its idiomatic word and thought pattern. On the other hand, by reversing this motto to In the end was the Word, one could well characterize the attitude of the old-fashioned method. For the latter disregards the word as the vital source from which spring all known manifestations of language. Without attempting to secure the assimilation of the foreign pattern of thinking in words, it makes, on a mere basis of theoretic principles, its foremost concern the teaching of by translation from English. By doing so, it chains the student's mind to the idiomatic pattern of his own language which is worlds apart from that of the foreign language in which he is expected to compose. The old-fashioned conception of composition is reflected in a goodly number of grammars in which English sentences to be translated into the foreign tongue appear under the heading Composition not Translation.