The Cultural Value of Foreign Language Teaching*

Abstract

IN ANSWERING the question what is the cultural value of foreign language teaching, we will deliberately confine our subject to such teaching in schools, as part of the general training and education of the students. It seems to be most reasonable then that, in order to define that value, in most cases use is made of the same distinction that is applied to the definition of the aims of education in general. Though each educator, according to his scientific standpoint and his social, cultural, religious or moral connections and presuppositions, will define these aims in his own way, these definitions will grosso modo show two main points: they will stress the importance of education first, as the preparation of the young student, boy or girl, for the role he will as an adult have to play, for the community as well as for himself, in the practice of the economic, social and political life of his time, and, secondly, as the development of all the potentialities and abilities of the individual personality. In applying this binary principle to foreign language teaching, these definitions, vague as they already may be, are still further reduced, so that we very often content ourselves with the terms practical use and cultural value. These have become hardly any more than empty slogans. It often seems that we are not sufficiently conscious of the hollowness of these ideas and of their heterogeneity. For the idea marked by the term practical use this is perhaps less serious than for its apparent counterpart, the cultural value. What we mean by the term practical use is not too difficult to understand in this age of ever increasing international contacts and of a steadily growing consciousness of cultural interdependency. If, hardly fifty years ago, there may have existed some doubt about the need for large groups of the population to master one or more foreign languages, at present every one is convinced that instruction in at least one foreign language has to be part of the compulsory curriculum of all future citizens. We need not