A 'New' Home for Modern Language Instruction

"J'ai un crayon rouge." (Pause)

"Avez-vous un crayon rouge?" (Pause)

"J'ai un crayon rouge et un stylo noir." (Pause)

These words, coming through the earphones in the rejuvenated basement of Boylston Hall, represent dual revolutions in Harvard's teaching of modern languages which will reach their culmination this year. A new method and a not-so-new building combine to give the College's undergraduates a far better chance to learn to speak foreign languages well than at any time in the past, and represent an unmourned break with previous tradition.

The first part of the equation is Boylston Hall. This building, resembling the Charlestown jail more than a modern center for instruction in languages, has been completely reconstructed to give the modern language departments an opportunity to utilize the "oral-aural," "direct," method of teaching. Once a drafty museum of natural history, once the finest chemical laboratory in the United States, and once the headquarters of the Yen-Ching Institute Boylston has undergone another complete transmutation.

Gone from the greystone building are the dinosaur skeletons which decorated the huge stairwell leading to the skylight; the stairs themselves have disappeared during the 15-month reconstruction. Precious scrolls and documents from China have been transferred to a fire-proof, air conditioned library on Divinity Avenue, while the scientific facilities have been centralized on Oxford St. for over 30 years.

At a cost of slightly over $1 million, provided by the Program for Harvard College, the Division of Modern Languages acquired a language center comparable to any in America. "There had been some pressure to tear the building down," Harry T. Levin, chairman of the Division, explains. "However, by saving the shell and reconstructing the entire interior, rather than building a whole new structure the University saved at least $800,000"--an important factor in this period of continually rising costs. Its convenient location on the main pathway between the Houses and the Yard close to Widener helped clinch the decision to rebuild and not to build anew.

Although the sombre facade remains distressingly unaltered, save for stairs at the entrance and air-conditioning equipment atop the mansard roof, the interior has changed beyond recognition. Clever designing increased the usable floor space by 50 per cent without changing the hallowed limestone blocks. Architects Collaborative, which drew the reconstruction plans, gained space primarily by adding an extra floor, in fact one-and-a-half more floors the mezzanine and by eliminating the cavernous stairwell.

With 90 offices, the building will provide space for the staffs of Romance Languages, Germanic Languages, Slavic, History and Literature, Comp Lit, Classics, and Public Speaking (housed in the "attic"). With these numerous offices, the departments will have expanded facilities that will soon allow even the junior members to enjoy private rooms. Specifically-constructed Finnish furniture adorns seminar rooms, a modern library occupies the new mezzanine floor, and the lecture hall--when it loses its canvas protective covering--will have great beauty. "President Pusey gave us one directive," Levin comments, "Get a good-looking lecture room.'"

But the raison d'etre of the structure can be found in the basement where, for the last month, students have used such devices as tape recorders, master voices, playback mechanisms, and individual earphones for each private booth. This is the language laboratory, Harvard's manifestation of a well-proved theory of languages instruction.

Upon entering the basement room for the first time, one is struck by the bee-like buzzing on muted voices. Students, capped with Buck Rogers earphones, listen intently and then murmur into microphones which they hold before them. At the front of the room, tape recorders whirl; an instructor watches them and occasionally twists dials to discover how his proteges are fairing in their strange new world of a foreign tongue. The entire scene contrasts with the grim, grey exterior of the building; the lab itself is bright, cheering, and more like 1984 than 1859. And, at last, language teaching at the College has caught up with the twentieth century.

Repetition forms the key to the oral-aural method, the new and better way to teach foreign languages which Harvard has finally adopted. Instead of studying grammar per se, students pick up grammar implicitly; instead of learning rules for pronunciation, they first learn to say many words and later discover the rules.

A "master voice," free of imperfections, is recorded on a single master tape, which is then played on one of the four machines in the front of the language lab. Students sitting in their individual, sound-proofed booths hear the master voice through their earphones, and then repeat into the microphone what they have just heard--or thought they heard. Both master voice and student voice are recorded, so that, in a later playback session, each pupil can hear his mistakes and act to correct them.

"We have advanced from passive listening to active mimicry by having students repeat what they hear from the master voice," Edward Geary, assistant professor of Romance Languages, comments. He points out the "autocritical" function: If a person makes an egregious mispronunciation, he then hears it when he replays the tape. This method, carried on in the privacy of individual booths, also avoids embarrassment for students about their blunders," Geary states, in addition to hammering in corrent pronunciations.

Students in French A, French C, and German A attend class four times per week, the additional hour being devoted to practice in pronunciation in the language lab. The homework load is cut proportionally. At other colleges using the direct method, elementary languages are often run eight hours per week, in order to teach a new tongue more effectively and speedily.

In addition to instilling better pronunciation, the oral-aural method provides better results in teaching the language as a whole, reading as well as speaking. Jack M. Stein, professor of German and director of elementary German courses, points out that students using the direct method did better last year on the language proficiency examination--a test based only on reading knowledge--than did students in a course directed toward reading and translation. The direct method, Stein unequivocally states, is "much better. I won't use any other method."

The oral-aural method started under strange conditions. Just before the outbreak of World War II, the American Council of Learned Societies attempted to find a better way to teach esoteric languages, such as Mongolian or Hindi. With a paucity of teachers understanding these tongues, the Council hit upon the use of tape recorders and a direct approach to the language: Submerge the student in an atmosphere of the language from the very first by use of a recorded master voice and let him absorb the language gradually as does a child. This experiment rapidly expanded, however, with the start of the war. The Armed Services had to teach foreign languages--both well and quickly. Thus, the Army Specialized Training Program was established, by which draftees learned new tongues in a matter of weeks and not of years.

Cornell took heed of the Army's very successful experiments, and launched its own intensive courses in modern languages. Classes met eight hours per week in new atmosphere--English was not spoken in the room. Mechanical devices and "native informants" (graduate students from foreign countries) helped perfect pronunciation. By 1950, the program had proven so successful that Cornell adopted it outright. Columbia soon followed, and rapidly developed a comparable program which gave it, along with Cornell, the finest elementary language courses of colleges in the nation.

Meanwhile, Harvard continued with the time-honored dusty-dry procedure of teaching translation rather than a language. One studied grammar, not conversation. But this grammatical analysis Stein is convinced, "stifled American interest in languages," and certainly many of the complaints registered in the past about Harvard language courses touched precisely on this now-out dated approach. "In the past, students thought German was only English translated, but this is wrong. You cannot learn about a culture simply by translating into English."

The modern method views speech as a means to comprehension. "The student must first acquire a new set of speaking habits," Stein says, "and acquire a sense for the language." In turn, this knowledge leads to an understanding of a new culture--an aim to which the entire Division of Modern Languages directs its efforts. After all, Geary points out, language is but one manifestation of a culture; and language itself cannot be segmented artificially into reading and speaking skills. By emphasizing the basic mechanics of speech, rather than the secondary rules of grammar, students acquire, far more quickly and much more effectively, a knowledge of a language and consequently of an entire culture.

Leadership of the new movement at Harvard has been vested in two outstanding men, Geary and Stein. Geary has paid particular attention to the reconstruction of Boylston Hall, especially the language laboratory. He often wanders through the unfinished building, checking equipment, making sure the lab is operating correctly, and acting as a sort of overseer for the project. The laboratory, his main interest, has received much of his attention.

Stein has been more concerned with a reorganization of elementary German courses. A professor at Columbia until a year ago, Stein headed their exceptionally successful modern language program, so well that Levin deems him "the best man in the country for teaching beginning German." He teaches two sections, one in German B and one in German C, and an upper-level course; he also heads a group of five instructors and fifteen part-time assistants ("all in training to become language teachers") concerned with lower-level German instruction. Stein came to Harvard convinced of the value of the direct method of instruction, and in the last year he has made several significant changes within the department. Most important, of course, is the establishment of the oral-aural system for German sections.

The oral-aural method, however, has not been limited exclusively to a few but has been adopted to a certain extent in most language classes. For example, Stein has completely revamped German B this year. Using a text published only a few months ago, based upon sucessful linguistic studies, members of the course commit a basic reading to memory, learning grammar to a large extent by osmosis. Learning becomes a "dynamic process." Sections in German B are conducted almost entirely in German, although the course is specifically intended to help students gain a greater reading than speaking knowledge; from the very moment they enter the room, the students are surrounded by an atmosphere of German.

At the end of each basic reading appears a series of simple questions which can be answered by reference to the reading itself. During the class period, the section leader will fire these questions at students and hopefully will receive an answer immediately in perfect German. "I definitely do not want my students to translate the question into English, formulate an answer, and then translate this back into German; I want them to think directly in German," Stein states. Although it is yet too early to evaluate the success of this limited oral-aural approach in reading courses, the new method certainly represents an advance over the tedious--and less educational--process of grammatical exposition. With the rapid fire of question and answer, classes become both challenging and interesting.

Repetition enters into the classroom as well as into the language lab. After all, the exponents of the oral-aural method state, a child learns his language habits only through constant exposure to and practice of a single tongue. The child does not think consciously, "Does this preposition take the dative case? Is the definite article placed before or after the past participle? What is the gender of this noun?" Rather, he learns almost instinctively what is correct and what is not. And it is precisely this sort of semi-innate knowledge which the direct method seeks to inculate. Not to think in English: In a nutshell, this epitomizes the aim of modern teachers of the modern languages.

The process of osmotic absorption, however, does not prove as effective for a college freshman as for a stu-13HARRY T. LEVIN