Army Specialized Training Program Research Articles

The failures of political prophecy: Ernst Kantorowicz’s wartime lectures

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a series of lectures Ernst Kantorowicz offered to the Army Specialized Training Program in 1943 in order to reconsider the development of his intellectual biography. These “wartime lectures” constitute Kantorowicz’s only sustained discussion of modern German history and his only intellectual engagement with Nazism. Introducing these lectures thus presents an opportunity to re-examine the relationship between Kantorowicz’s early and mature works through his assessment of Nazi Germany. For Kantorowicz, Nazism was the violent result of a German commitment to political prophecy. At the core of Kantorowicz’s lectures was a criticism of political theology and its role in modern history. In making this criticism, Kantorowicz simultaneously distanced himself from the prophetic register of his earlier writings. Moreover, recovering Kantorowicz’s concern with modern political theology is also important in foregrounding the intellectual genealogy of The King’s Two Bodies, a work often separated from its more telling subtitle: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Together, this paper argues that the most significant changes in Kantorowicz’s writings can be traced to the intellectual circumstances of the Second World War.

American Geographers and World War II: Spies, Teachers, and Occupiers

This article reviews the military duties of a number of U.S. geographers during World War II. It divides those duties into three kinds: spies, teachers, and occupiers. In each case, a specific form of geographical expertise was deployed—instrumental to achieving a particular military end. In particular, the article examines the roles of geographers: first, in the analysis of military intelligence at the Office of Strategic Services; second, in the provision of geographical courses for the university-based Civil Affairs Training School and the Army Specialized Training Program; and, finally, as agents of occupation in Japan once World War II ended.

O Army Method e o desenvolvimento da Linguística Aplicada nos Estados Unidos

Este artigo deriva de pesquisa historiográfica sobre o ensino de português nos Estados Unidos durante os anos 40, 50 e 60 do século 20. Baseado em fontes primárias, como livros, períódicos e jornais da época, o trabalho apresenta objetivamente a relação do Army Specialized Training Program, que se tornou conhecido como Army Method, com o desenvolvimento da Linguística Aplicada ao ensino de línguas estrangeiras nos Estados Unidos.

In Memoriam: Robert M. Chanock, MD, 1924-2010

In Memoriam: Robert M. Chanock, MD, 1924-2010

æ§‹é€ è¨€èªžå­¦ã«ç†è«–的基盤を置ã日本語教育 (JAPANESE LANGUAGE EDUCATION BASED ON THE THEORY OF STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS)

Structural Linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. Structural Linguistics involves collecting a corpus of utterances and then applying discovery procedures to them in an attempt to classify all of the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels as the phonemes, morphemes, word classes, noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence types. After Saussure, the history of Structural Linguistics branches off in two separate directions. First, in America, linguist Leonard Bloomfield's reading of Saussure's course proved influential, bringing about the Bloomfieldean phase of phase in American Linguistics that lasted from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s. Second, in Europe, Saussure influenced the Prague School of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose work would prove hugely influential, particularly concerning phonology, and the Copenhagen School of Louis Hjelmslev. Teaching methods which are based on structral linguistics are ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) and Audio Lingual Method (AL-Method) also known as Michigan Method, Fries Method, or Oral Approach. During World War II (1943-1044), there were 20 countries which used these teaching methods including Japan, and brought a great result especially in Japanese language education.  Keywords : Structural Linguistics, Saussure, ASTP, Audio Lingual Method, Japanese Language Education

ASTP: MODEL PEMBELAJARAN BAHASA ASING BAGI MILITER

The United States Army during the Second World War stunned the education world with their foreign language teaching experience. Their program that is called “The Army Specialized Training Program” (ASTP) was able to successfully train many participants with a very high success rate. Dr. Hamada Ibrahim, a professor in foreign languages at Cairo University, Egypt, described the “ASTP” as the most immense and successful program of learning foreign language in the history. The US Army foreign language program encompasses the background for the emergence of this program, a general picture of the program, the teaching subjects as well as the teaching techniques.

The “Scientific Linguist” Goes to War

SummaryDuring World War II there arose in the United States an urgent need for intensive foreign language instruction that emphasized the spoken language. Beginning in April, 1943, the U. S. Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) established approximately 500 intensive speaking courses in over 30 languages in fifty-five United States universities. After a single year, the program was suddenly abandoned, owing to combat personnel needs. The present study proposes to describe the sources, implementation, content, materials development, and methods of the ASTP in foreign languages. The study analyzes the ASTP Spanish language materials, explores the attempts at assessing the speaking proficiency of trainees of the program, and evaluates the program’s contributions to subsequent pedagogical approaches and assessment in the United States.

Sixty‐Two Years of Hydrogeology Memories

My life journey began in 1924 at Trenton, Missouri, in the midwestern region of the United States. Jobs were scarce during the Great Depression, but my father was able to find employment in Detroit, Michigan, and so my family moved there when I was 2 years old. I attended several grade and high schools and a small engineering college, Lawrence Institute of Technology, in the Detroit metropolitan area. Like many of my generation, my plans were interrupted by World War II. I was drafted into the U.S. Army and completed my freshman and sophomore years at Indiana University as part of the Army Specialized Training Program. I became a topographic surveyor and was assigned to the 14th Field Artillery Observation Battalion of the U.S. Third Army, commanded at that time by George S. Patton. I went ashore with that battalion when it landed on Utah Beach late at night on D-day of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France. I was injured several months later when my observation post near Bastogne, Belgium, was hit by enemy artillery during the Battle of the Bulge. After the war ended, I returned to Detroit and resumed my college education, graduating with a BS in civil engineering in 1948. My hydrogeology memories started soon after that when, one evening in 1946, my father announced that he and I were going into the business of drilling water wells. My father bought his first percussion rig that summer and painted a big red sign on it: ‘‘Walton and Son Water Well Contractors.’’ We practiced drilling and developing wells in our backyard located in the northwest suburbs of Detroit, with the help of my father’s well drilling friend. During the next few years, I spent my spare time between college classes learning how to fill out a water well log and how to locate a 1-foot-thick lens of sand by the feel of the cable tools. My father eventually owned and operated four percussion rigs. I continued drilling wells part time until 1949 when I accepted the position of hydraulic engineer with the USGS at Madison, Wisconsin. The Survey’s office was next door to the State Geologist’s office in the basement of Science Hall across from Memorial Union. Frank Foley, the District Geologist, and his assistant, Bill Drescher, told me on my first day that for the next 2 years, I would be evaluating the ground water resources of the Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer in the MilwaukeeWaukesha area. Now most of what Frank said went over my head. But then Frank assured me that he and Bill would, in good time, help me with my task and suggested that I might want to enroll at the University of Wisconsin and take some geology courses. Needless to say, I immediately enrolled and started my second educational voyage by enrolling in physical and historical geology classes. I also learned some important lessons in the field, beginning with a 5-d pumping test that our office conducted at Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I was issued a stopwatch, steel tape, blue carpenter’s chalk, and a notebook and was assigned to measure water levels in a well during the midnight shift. I was instructed to coat the steel tape with the chalk, feed the tape through a small hole in the pump base, and then record the readings of the water levels in the well. On the last day, Bill Drescher told us to plot up our data, match it to the so-called Theis type curve, and calculate something called T and S. I quickly finished the task and proudly handed my results to Bill who broke out laughing and said ‘‘not on this planet.’’ I had accidentally fed the tape into a dry well that was partially wet, carefully recording bogus water levels over and over again. Soon after that, I learned more than I wanted to know about ground water level, climate, earth tide, and barometric records as the result of having been placed in charge of the statewide observation well program. The area under investigation for the MilwaukeeWaukesha project was only partly covered by topographic maps. Somehow, bedrock surfaces, formation thicknesses, piezometric surfaces, and the water table had to be mapped and cross sections had to be drawn in all directions from Lake Michigan without the benefit of full topographic coverage. I managed to do this using benchmarks located at railroad stations, an aneroid altimeter, railroad maps, highway corridor maps, and cross sections. Consultant in Water Resources, 101 West Windsor Road Apt 4110, Urbana, IL 61802; eg107@hotmail.com Copyright a 2008 The Author(s) Journal compilationa 2008National GroundWater Association. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6584.2008.00448.x

Carleton Taylor Hodge

Carleton Taylor Hodge Alan S. Kaye How vividly I recall the feeling of eager anticipation looking forward to the well-organized and informative lectures Professor Carleton Hodge presented in his ‘Structure of Ancient Egyptian’ course at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Linguistic Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor during the summer of 1965. I was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley at the time, taking his and three other courses. Little did I imagine then that he and I would maintain a lively correspondence from that summer on for the next thirty-three years, nor did I expect that we would come to spend so much time together at the joint annual meetings of the American Oriental Society and the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, which we would regularly attend for a quarter of a century. We also lectured on each other’s campuses, and I took great delight that many of my fellow Californians personally came to appreciate not only his scholarship (Hodge 1991a and 1991c), but also his charming and celebrated wit and sense of humor. Hodge was born on November 27, 1917 to Clarence Sim and Nina (Eaton) Hodge in Springfield, Illinois, where he was raised. He died on September 8, 1998 at the age of eighty at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, where he was Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at Indiana University (IU).1 He left Illinois in 1935 to attend Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as a Rector Scholar. In those days, he was interested in biblical studies and majored in Greek and Latin, receiving his A.B. Phi Beta Kappa in 1939. During his sophomore year, however, he decided to become a linguist, since he was much influenced (especially at informal Saturday night meetings on anthropological linguistics) by a new member of the Depauw faculty, Charles (Carl) F. Voegelin, Professor of Anthropology. Voegelin was to become Hodge’s lifelong friend, mentor, and colleague at IU. At Voegelin’s urging, Hodge attended the linguistic institutes at the University of Michigan in 1938,2 1939, and 1940, studying with such giants as Edgar Sturtevant, Roland G. Kent, Franklin Edgerton, and Voegelin himself, who taught field methods courses using Delaware and Ojibway. In addition, Hodge was fortunate enough to hear lectures by Leonard Bloomfield. Hodge began his graduate career in linguistics and Oriental studies in fall 1939, at the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a Harrison Scholar and later Fellow) studying with such luminaries as E. A. Speiser (Akkadian, Hebrew, and Urartean), Giorgio Della Vida (Arabic), and W. Norman Brown (Sanskrit). He completed his dissertation under Zellig S. Harris on Hausa (published as Hodge 1947) receiving the Ph.D. in linguistics in 1943. Later that year on June 2, he married Patricia E. Sutcliffe, with whom he had four children.3 They were a devoted couple, and attended many [End Page 156] linguistic conferences together, where they could often be seen walking together in and around the hotel. I fondly recall speaking with her at many of those. Hodge’s first home and position were, strangely enough, in Bloomington, Indiana, where he would later spend most of his career. He was hired by IU for 1943–44 as an instructor of Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian in the Army Specialized Training Program. The next two years took him to the University of Maryland, College Park, back to the University of Pennsylvania, and to New York City where he worked on the aforementioned Slavic languages and also on Japanese. He was asked to supervise classes in Japanese which used a prepublication version of a manual on the language by Bernard Bloch and Eleanor Harz Jordan. In the fall of 1946 he joined the U.S. State Department, which had a program for foreign service officers, headed by Henry Lee Smith, Jr. Hodge worked for the next sixteen years on pedagogical materials using informants of Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Hausa (Hodge 1963b), Persian (both Iranian and Afghan dialects), Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish, and also served as the editor of FSI language materials (the Foreign Service Institute [FSI] was created by the Foreign Service Act of 1946). Three significant articles...

Foreword: Law, Medicine and Socially Responsible Research

S. Rebecca Holmes-Farley^ and Michael A. Grodin^^ As we stand at the threshold of the twenty-first century, certain issues in research ethics have taken center stage. Some have been brought to the fore by changes in scientific knowledge or by political or economic factors; others are continuing reminders of areas not yet adequately addressed. This Symposium issue of the American Journal of Law & Medicine seeks to identify and discuss some of the research issues most likely to face us in the new millennium. Several authors, notably Norman Fost, Leonard Glantz and George Annas, offer insights and proposals regarding existing federal regulations. Others undertake an analysis of less conventional issues. Kathleen Boozang, for instance, discusses the interplay between holistic medicine and the physician-patient relationship. Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews delve into the complexities of research on dead bodies. In the final article, Jesse Goldner reviews both historical and contemporary attempts to provide legal disincentives to those who would engage in scientific misconduct. Because our present perceptions are often a function of where we have been, it may be instructive to recount a few of the pivotal moments in twentieth century research ethics. A starting point for our reflections is the formal recognition of the principle of informed consent. notion of consent has played a role in American research ethics and law since as far back as the 1830s,l but it was not until the Nuremberg war crime trials following World War II that consent principles were formally reduced to writing. Nuremberg Code, comprised of ten principles on human experimentation, originated from the final judgment rendered in the Doctors' Trial at the end of World War II.2 most oft cited of its principles is the first: The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.3 Reducing this principle to writing was critical not only in the context of the trial but also because the United States disregarded this principle in its zealous pursuit of the war effort.4 During World War II, the United States committed flagrant abuses of individual rights. As has often been the case in this country's history, many of the subjects whose rights were violated were members of vulnerable populations-the disenfranchised, incompetent and impoverished. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development.5 One of its functions was to oversee the Committee on Medical Research (CMR). CMR, in turn, conducted research aimed at anticipating, preventing or ameliorating the health problems faced by American soldiers.6 In a wellintentioned effort to protect its military forces, the United States began routine testing of potentially therapeutic agents on nonconsenting populations. When the United States became concerned that its military force would succumb to debilitating bouts of dysentery, it tested experimental vaccines on the mentally retardedlearning, in the end, that the vaccines were too toxic for common use.7 Appeals to utilitarianism were made in a feeble attempt to justify government-sponsored research that violated human dignity. Around the same time, some 500 inmates at the Stateville Prison in Illinois volunteered to act as subjects for the testing of an antimalarial therapy,8 while mentally retarded persons in Pennhurst, Pennsylvania and mentally ill patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital, Michigan were used to test anti-influenza preparations.9 Office of the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army tested a promising antiinfluenza vaccine on select enrollees in the Army Specialized Training Program.0 In the period surrounding World War II, tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen were exposed involuntarily to chemical warfare agents.ii More recently, we have learned of unconscionable radiation experiments performed on mentally retarded children, terminally ill patients, servicemen and others from 1944 to 1974. …

Nunc Dimittis

Allen A. Kurnick died on March 21, 1995 in Portland, Maine. He was born in Kovno, Lithuania, on March 15, 1921. At the age of 17 he and his parent emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Los Angeles, California. He married Nita Bender, who passed away in 1979. After graduation from high school, Allen served as managing partner of the family retail business. For 3 yr, from 1943 to 1946, Kurnick served with the U.S. Army Aviation Engineer Battalion in the Pacific. During this period, he completed an army specialized training program for Russian language at Oregon State College.After returning from the military, he managed the family business for 4 yr and later owned a poultry ranch for 1 yr. During this 5-yr period, Kurnick attended Pierce Junior College, and later transferred to California State Polytechnic College, San Luis Obispo, California, where he received his B.S. degree in …

Historical Perspective: Charles C. Carpenter and Reptilian Behavioral Ecology

I was pleased to be invited by the organizers of this symposium to give an opening encomium for Charles Congden Carpenter. I was honored to be asked to say something about the career and contributions of a personal friend and colleague. His accomplishments would be easy to relate, for the record is clear to all, but what about his personal traits? Perhaps a roast would work. Or should I keep things more serious and, perhaps, more in accord with the occasion? After obtaining the input of some of his family members and former students-and probably to Chuck's great relief-I soon decided that a roast was just not reconcilable with the personality and character of the man we honor here. Although Chuck is certainly not without humor-all who know him will recall his often twinkling eye, followed by a droll comment or pun and often what can be described only as Chuck's chuckle-he is in the final analysis a gentleman scholar, somewhat of the old school, who keeps his own counsel. Carpenter was born on 2 June 1921 in Denison, Iowa. He received his B.A. degree from Northern Michigan College of Education in 1943. After graduation, he entered the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) and attended training programs at several colleges, including a year at Wayne University Medical School in Detroit. After the end of World War II and at his own request, he left for graduate school at the University of Michigan. He received his M.S. in 1947 and Ph.D. in 1951. Frederick Test was his major professor. In 1947 he married Mary Pitynski, who also has had a professional career as an outstanding biochemist at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Their oldest daughter, Janet, despite severe diabetes that led to blindness and kidney transplants, completed two degrees in anthropology and continues to live independently and remain active in community affairs. Their other daughter, Caryn Sue (Vaughn), completed her Ph.D. at Oklahoma and is an aquatic ecologist with the Oklahoma Biological Survey. Their son, Geoff, recently received his Ph.D. from New Mexico State and presented the first scientific paper in this symposium. In the summer of 1952 Carpenter first taught at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station, and in 1953 he joined the Faculty at Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor, thus continuing the tradition there in herpetology and vertebrate zoology established by his predecessors A. I. Ortenberger, A. 0. Weese, and Arthur Bragg. In 1959 he was promoted to Associate Professor and also became Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the Stovall Museum (now the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History). Carpenter became a full Professor in 1966. In 1987 he became a Professor Emeritus and Curator Emeritus. Retired, but certainly not inactive, he has published several papers and a centennial history of his department. Carpenter's honors include Distinguished Alumni Award from Northern Michigan University, University of Oklahoma Regents' Award for Superior Accomplishment in Research & Creative Activity, first recipient (1986) of the W. Frank Blair Eminent Naturalist Award of the Southwestern Association of Naturalists, Outstanding Scientist Award from the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences (1991), Fellow of The Herpetologists' League,

Take Wing! Interesting Things That Happened On My Way To School

Dr E. Grey Dimond's autobiography, from childhood through retirement from academic medicine, is a fascinating and exciting read. Its tenor is one of vaulting ambition combined with exuberant enthusiasm for the good fortune of being a physician and total confidence in the worthiness of his profession. We learn a little about Dimond's childhood in a small Mississippi town, of the tragedy of his alcoholic father, of his early first and unsuccessful marriage, and of his attending Purdue University and the Indiana University Medical School. The author's medical education occurred during World War II via the accelerated Army Specialized Training Program. As early as his first year, he took umbrage at the rigidity of both pre-medical and medical school curricula. He describes a "dreary lectureintensive year... and the required initiation rites of the tedious, macabre, strangely irrelevant dissection of the formaldehyde-soaked cadaver." By contrast, much of his time after the first

Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II.

Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II.

Open admissions does not kill colleges

Theodore L. Gross, dean of humanities at City College of New York, would have us believe that open admissions killed his institution.1 A program which came to life during the close of the turbulent sixties now faces a sharp attack in the reactionary seventies. It is tragic that programs of reform such as open admissions should depend on political and economic climates for their existence. Nonetheless, it is most important to look objectively at open admissions and to determine whether it kills colleges. Roots of the open admissions concept go deep into our history. The egalitarian motive was a basic ingredient of the 1862 Morrill Act, which set the stage for universal higher education by establishing landgrant colleges. Between 1900 and 1970, the proportion of 18to 21-year olds attending college increased from 4 percent to 40 percent.2 World War II produced far-reaching reforms in college admissions by way of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) and the post-war GI Bill. For example, ASTP flooded American colleges with students, regardless of qualifications, to prepare them to play an active role in the war effort. After the war, the GI Bill sent masses of veterans to college to help them re-enter society with jobs and meaningful lives. A 1973 Carnegie Commission study concluded that the quality of higher education had been generally maintained since World War II and the lowering of admissions standards had not affected adversely the quality of higher learning. In 1960, the California state college system implemented one of the first major open admissions programs in the United States. By the late 1960s, 68 percent of Califoria's high school graduates were entering college; no evidence exists that its system of higher education has suffered as a result of open admissions. The

Current Trends in the Teaching of English in France

those of their American counterparts, and the influence of the work done by the Army Specialized Training Program at Monterey is evident, but the new methods being developed in France differ significantly from our own. This fact is not surprising; for many years French linguistic research has been moving in a different direction from ours, and foreign language pedagogy has long been different also. These differences date generally from the turn of the century. Ferdinand de Saussure in his Cours de Linguistique Generale,l established the fundamental principles of modern linguistics, and his theories of language have been and are a considerable influence on linguists in France. Of particular importance to those linguists concerned with foreign language teaching is his concept of the signe. An expression which conveys meaning can be called a signe (sign or symbol). The signe has two completely interdependent parts: the signifiants-the sounds which make up the expression, and the signifies-the ideas conveyed by the expression. Andre Martinet has added to this his concept of the double articulation of any given language. The first articulation is the one according to which one's need to communicate something

Our Profession in Reverse

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

A Look at ASTP as Student and Teacher

T HE arguments for and against the intensive language method developed for the Army Specialized Training Program have filled not only pages and pages of our professional journals; they have also spread into the popular magazines. The interesting thing to me about all these articles is that I have not yet seen one written by a teacher who himself had studied a new language by the ASTP method. Perhaps my having studied two languages and taught two others according to ASTP principles may justify my throwing this additional fuel on the flames of ASTP controversy. In the spring of 1944 I was lent by one of the American voluntary relief agencies to UNRRA for a year's service as a relief worker in the UNRRA Balkan Mission. Before going overseas I studied both Modern Greek and Serbo-Croatian by the ASTP method for two months at the UNRRA Training Center, near Washington, where the texts for those two languages, since published by Henry Holt and Company, were written and first tried out. Each language was under the supervision of an American trained in linguistics; classes were limited to eight students each with a native speaker as a guide; and the classes met for two hours a day. After only twelve of the thirty lesson units that are included in the regular ASTP courses I left for Egypt, spending the next ten months in work among some 25,000 Yugoslav refugees in an UNRRA camp on the Egyptian desert. Proof of the value of those twelve lessons of Serbo-Croatian lies in the fact that after two months among the Yugoslavs I carried on all my daily business in Serbo-Croatian without an interpreter, and within another month I myself had begun to serve as an occasional interpreter for the British commandant of the camp in which I worked! Since returning to the United States last summer I have been using the original ASTP textbook in one Spanish class and a civilian adaptation of the method in first-year French. Now, what is so new or different about the ASTP method? To judge by the articles describing it in the popular magazines you would think nobody had ever taught foreign languages properly before the War Department took over. On the other hand, many of the articles in our professional journals give the impression that, apart from the greatly increased number of hours in class, the reduction in the size of classes, the rigid selection of students and a special wartime motivation, ASTP contained nothing that successful teachers had not been doing all along.

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

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.

The Problem of the Drillmaster

Now that the war emergency is past we can look forward to a flood of reports and evaluations which are concerned with the various aspects of the war effort. In time undoubtedly a series of books such as Merchants of Death will appear to give us the less spectacular and less successful aspects of the war effort, which were not revealed earlier for security reasons, or simply because it was unpopular to do so. Regarding the Army Specialized Training Program, in so far as it concerned the teaching of foreign languages, there was not much time lost in examining and discussing it while the war was still in progress and since the termination of hostilities. The report of the Special Committee of the MLA, published in 1944 was the first comprehensive authoritative report on the subject, and The Army Specialized Training Issue of the GERMAN QUARTERLY (Vol. XVII, Nov. 1944, No. 4, Part 1) contains an excellent summary of the reactions, pro and con, of outstanding educators in the field. Meanwhile the question as to what can profitably be adopted for civilian classes in colleges and universities has become one of timely interest. Various reports, those mentioned and numerous others exploring the possibilities of adopting some features of the army program, cover the subject rather well except for one problem which, if mentioned at all, is given comparatively little attention; a matter which is, nevertheless, of great importance, if the question is discussed: what features of the ASTP should be retained or adopted for the teaching of civilian classes? It is the problem of the drillmaster.