The Preparation of College Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages

Abstract

N DECEMBER 1951, the Modern Language Association reasserted its original policy of including among its official concerns pedagogical matters involving modern languages, matters that it had ignored since the 1920's. The MLA took this step not because its members had grown less devoted to scholarship but because they were reminded of a nearly forgotten truth: a widespread neglect of language will erode, and eventually destroy, the foundation on which literary scholarship must build. That the neglect existed was known by many, including college admission officers, the Foreign Service, even graduate departments of Arts and Sciences that saw its effects in the shrinking language competence of their entering students. What no one knew was its extent. Since effective action can not be taken without an accurate assessment of the situation, the Foreign Language Program was launched in 1952, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, to gather facts and figures and to determine the role that language learning should play in American life. As it ended its first decade, the Foreign Language Program could look back with some gratification on what had been accomplished. Its fact finding had made possible that influential document, William Riley Parker's The National Interest and Foreign Languages, now in its third edition. The Program had contributed significantly to the shaping and passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. It had developed new teaching materials on the elementary school and college levels. It had defined the proficiencies to be expected of modern-foreign-language teachers and devised means of testing them. Most of its noteworthy accomplishments in that decade were in the elementary and secondary schools. It was not that college and university problems had been neglected; an impressive beginning had been made by Modern Spanish. In general, however, it had seemed that higher education would best be served by paying concentrated attention first to the broad base on which our whole educational structure rests. During those ten hard-working years most problems of foreign languages in the schools had been attacked if not solved. Among the high-level issues remaining, perhaps the most important, surely the most sensitive, was better teacher preparation. This, then, was among the FL Program's chief preoccupations as it entered its second decade. And indeed the nature and magnitude of the problem were such as to constitute virtually a second phase of the Program. The complex interrelationships were at once apparent. It is in liberal-arts colleges rather than in teachers' colleges that the largest number of high-school teachers of foreign language receive their training. These teachers, in turn, determine the attitudes and skills that students bring to college and by which their achievement in this field is largely governed. The degree of success and achievement in college foreign-language teaching affects the number of graduates who will return to the high schools to teach. It also affects the number who will go on in:to graduate school to work toward the master's and doctor's degrees and thus replenish the supply of teachers and scholars in colleges and universities. And what happens to these last in graduate school will in turn exert a powerful influence on undergraduate instruction, where the whole process seems to have its roots. It has seemed clear, therefore, that improvement of teacher preparation must focus initially on the graduate school, the institution responsible for shaping not only teachers but teachers of teachers. In order to learn what graduate departments are doing specifically about teacher training, the MLA, with support from the Carnegie Corporation, devised a questionnaire and sent it to all the graduate schools that grant the Ph.D. in any modern foreign language. There