What's the History of Language Study in the US?
24 March 2005
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Hmmm. The first language taught to anyone in America was... Algonquian. New arrivals from England learned native American languages so they could survive in a foreign land. The goal: communication. But something happened to language teaching along the way. We built schools. And when we, as good Europeans, started teaching languages in the schools, we wanted the best of European tradition. So before the 1800's, learning a language in America meant learning Ancient Greek or Latin -- and often both.
When modern languages came on the scene -- and w're talking only about French, Spanish, Italian and German -- we studied them the same way people learned Latin and Greek -- and for the same reasons. Here's what Thomas Jefferson said in 1824, a year before his new University of Virginia opened:
"The Latin and Greek languages constitute the basis of good education and are indispensable to fill up the character of a well educated man." The next year he wrote, "We generally learn languages for the benefit of reading the books written in them." So much for communication.
For the next century and more, people mostly studied languages, not to talk with native speakers but to learn to read. The language class was all about reading, translating, and analyzing grammar -- not just in Latin and Greek but modern languages, too. So if you studied a language in the first half of the 20th century, you probably didn't learn to speak it. Because no one intended that you should. Speaking wasn't the goal.
And then came World War II. Suddenly we urgently needed a way of mass-producing speakers of foreign languages -- soldiers and civilians -- who could not just conjugate French verbs or read Don Quixote but actually talk with people in all parts of the world. And we needed a dazzling variety of languages-- everything from Dutch to Burmese.
The linguistic profession was pressed into war service... and the teaching of languages dramatically changed. Teachers were to use stimulus and response to imprint language patterns in student minds. Students were to learn by memorizing dialogues and producing rapid-fire responses in all kinds of oral drills.
It worked. More people became more fluent, in more languages, faster, through these so-called audiolingual courses than they ever could through the model of grammar and translation. World War II needs carried over into the Cold War, and demand for language learning -- Russian in particular -- remained high. Ancient Greek... fell off the charts. Latin became something of a boutique language, experiencing ups and downs in popularity.
By the early 1960s, the audiolingual method was widely used across the country. But its flaws began to show up. There were limitations on stimulus-response as a model for learning something as complex as a language. Researchers looked more closely at how language is acquired, and came to see it as an evolving process rather than something to be mastered. Language teaching changed again to reflect those insights.
Teaching also changed because students are pushing the envelope. They talk across continents with instant messages. They read websites. They download news and entertainment. They want to learn more about the cultures that use the languages they study. So in classrooms today, students take on real-world tasks.
If Jefferson were brought back to see what's happened since 1824, he'd mourn the status of Greek and Latin. But he'd no doubt be fascinated by today's students, the variety of languages they study, and the ways they develop language skills. If he could visit a typical classroom he'd see them working in pairs, moving around the room, chattering in short sentences, using imperfect but understandable grammar, and filling in meanings with gestures when necessary. Above all, communicating. I suspect it looked a lot like that when we were learning Algonquian...
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. June Phillips, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Weber State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about language, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.