The Ideal Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers*

Abstract

already exists somewhere and can reasonably be expected to exist anywhere. I have not tried to make it stand for supreme or absolute perfection. Secondly, I have used the term foreign language teacher to refer to anyone who teaches a language other than the learner's mother tongue. Although most of my comments bear directly on contemporary languages, including English, it will be found that, to a surprising extent, the same considerations apply to classical language as well. Thirdly, since preparation implies preparation for something, I have considered it a part of my assignment to be explicit about what it is our teachers are preparing for. A great deal has happened to language teaching since the Second World War, and particularly during the last decade. Just what is our status in the academic world in the middle of the nineteen-sixties? Certainly our profession now presents many features that were not characteristic of us in the nineteen-thirties, and it is no thanks to the kind of teaching that was current and typical at that time that we are where we are today. We can no longer think of language teaching only as it was then, wedded to word lists, grammar analysis, and translations, with almost no use whatever of the target language as used by those who speak it natively. Today there is a greatly increased range of objectives and activities, an open-mindedness, a receptivity to leadership, a sense of importance and urgency, an awareness of public interest in and support for what we do-not to mention federal financial aid-and a satisfaction in accomplishment, all of which would have been hard to discover among those engaged in language teaching between the two World Wars.