Our Profession in Reverse

Abstract

HE problems which we language teachers faced during the war in the Army Specialized Training Program and in the Civil Affairs Training Schools have already been well described. Much less known is a far smaller program in which three of us were asked to apply our usual techniques in reverse. As in the AST and CAT programs, the were soldiers in uniform, but there all similarity stopped. Instead of teaching a foreign language to American soldiers, we were to teach American English to foreigners; instead of the usual olive drab, the uniforms were motley in shape and color and had a large PW painted on the back of each shirt and on the seat of each pair of trousers; and instead of the dormitories and classrooms of a college, the campus consisted of the bare, drab barracks of a prisoner of war camp, set about with barbed wire. For these students were not Americans but carefully chosen anti-Nazi German and Austrian prisoners of war. The project at which we served was a small part of the whole reeducation program conducted by the Provost Marshal General throughout the prisoner of war camps in this country.' Our immediate objective was to train a selected few of these prisoners so that they could serve as administrative and police officials under American Military Government in their home countries. Hence a curriculum was established which included instruction in the aims, organization and methods of American Military Government and enough instruction in spoken American English to enable the prisoners to cooperate with their future employers. A much broader and, in the long run, more important objective was to strengthen these anti-Nazis' understanding of democracy; accordingly, a series of lectures and discussions was arranged on the democratic aspects of German history and on the workings of democracy in our own country. Language instruction was also expected to contribute to this larger objective since it was believed that a necessary prerequisite to acquainting with the culture of a people is to have them study its language. With our objectives thus clearly defined, the three of us in charge of language instruction set about organizing our part of the curriculum.2 We