"Harvard is no place to learn a foreign language." With this terse statement, a teaching fellow in an elementary Italian class here expressed a view which has become prevalent among faculty and student alike at Harvard. But the statement of this teaching fellow might also be expanded to read, "A college is no place to learn a foreign language."

This, a major academic problem, affects Harvard crucially, for this university has gained the reputation of sustained leadership in almost all fields of college study. But, in the words of Professor Wilbur M. Frohock, chairman of the Romance Languages department, "In advances and in the teaching of elementary languages, Harvard is following and not leading." A recent survey by the Chicago Tribune would seem to back Frohock's statement. Whereas Harvard was chosen as the top college in the country, seven out of its 28 major fields were labelled as "undistinguished." French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Linguistics were five of these.

450 Don't Pass Requirement

This College is behind and it cannot afford to be. It has a language requirement and its stated academic policy is that no student shall be allowed to graduate from here until he has passed this requirement. Some 450 freshmen entered the Class of '60 without having passed their language test and it then became Harvard's job to teach them or let them fall by the wayside. It may be foolish, as many feel, to impose a language requirement on college students who may be particularly inept at such study and who will be saddled with these elementary courses when they could be moving into higher academic brackets in other fields. The reasoning behind this is similar to that of Frohock, who maintains "I've never known an educated man who didn't know at least two languages."

The college language teacher's idea of utopia would be when a student came out of secondary school knowing two languages and entered college either to start on a third or to perfect his writing in the second. But this utopia will be long in coming, for the colleges now are doing the work of the secondary schools in teaching students elementary languages. There are some schools which have no language program at all whereas others give their pupils only an antiquated start in French or Spanish and see them come to grief in the College Board Exams. Until the secondary schools improve their language teaching to a far higher extent or until colleges stiffen their admissions policy, it will be the latter's function to teach a good percentage of their students a foreign language.

A college may not be the best place to learn a new language or more specifically, to pass one's language requirement; other institutions have realized this and have started to do something about it. "Certain other forward looking universities, such as Cornell and Columbia were doing seven years ago what we are doing now," Frohock points out.

Harvard Hasn't Kept Up

Harvard is behind because it never kept up. "We did not take advantages of the lessons learnt in World War II," Frohock says, "while such colleges as Cornell, Wesleyan, and Princeton did." Cornell, for instance, has an ambitious new program of language teaching which it started experimentation on as early as 1946. The question then must be: why did Harvard allow itself to become stagnated in an ivy-encrusted system first instituted by some English private school headmaster when it became evident that there were quicker and more efficient ways of learning a language?

The answer is not as evident as it may seem. It is a fact that until two years ago, the language departments at Harvard had allowed themselves to stagnate simply because, as Edward Geary, coordinator of Languages puts it, "no one had ever taken the trouble before." But besides this obvious answer, there is one other somewhat nebulous reason for the college's emphasis on old systems. Harvard's approach to language teaching has always been on the "literary" level. That is to say, when a professor was teaching a class how to speak French, he was really teaching his students about France. The goal of any elementary language course here was to teach the student how to read the language, both so he could delve into the literature and the culture of the particular tongue, and more specifically so (if he still had to) he could pass the college board, which is primarily a reading test.

But since the war, there has been a new movement. During World War II, when the government had to teach men French, German, Italian and other languages and had to teach them in a hurry, it was found that a far greater emphasis on actual speaking of the language was particularly effective. Tape recorders were pressed into use and men taught foreign languages by actual imitation of the sounds that they heard coming over the tape. When the war ended, Cornell was the first college to pick up this idea, using it on an experimental basis. By 1950 it had proved itself so successful that it was made the permanent method. As a result, Cornell has the most modern, if not the most successful language program in the country. The language is completely separated from the culture and no student is encouraged to read the literature of his particular language, as literature, until he has gained a thorough speaking knowledge.

Harvard, while recognizing the merits of this system, is not willing to go this far. "We are planning more and more emphasis on speaking," Frohock says, "but the fact remains that while my barber may speak French better than I do, he hasn't got a single intelligent thing to say in it. For myself, speaking is only important, because it helps you to learn to write the language." The Romance Language Department's plans for the next few years then definitely do include a new emphasis on oral teaching, but not to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual element.

Frohock points out that the department initiated last year modern methods in the elementary French courses: French R and French A. Geary is using the "direct method" of language teaching, i.e. from the moment the student steps into the classroom, he hears nothing but French. This system is designed to surround the student with an environment, so dominated by the language, that he absorbs it by osmosis, in the same fashion that he learned his own language. "It is still too early to tell how it is working out," Geary comments, "but it has worked at Cornell and there is no reason it should not work here." One teaching fellow in French R comments that "there is a prejudice against the direct method of language teaching here, for it is not intellectual enough for the intellectual Harvard students. But we will have results even if the students themselves don't like it."

"Machine System" Used

Another facet of the new methods now being employed here is the use of the "machine system" (tape recorders). "We are starting this in one of our elementary French courses," Frohock notes, "but we are far behind such colleges as Wesleyan and Columbia. They have many of these essential practice laboratories, we have only one which has just been started this year." Professors Henry Hatfield and Harry Levin are not quite so enthusiastic on the subject of tape recorders, the former remarking that "we haven't gone overboard on machines, but we are waiting to see how they work out. This is a pilot experiment." Geary and Frohock hope to institute the use of machines and modern methods into the intermediate courses within the near future, for they feel the situation here is even worse than in the elementary courses. "By the time, a student gets to his second year," Geary comments, "he is often sick and tired of languages. We should give them more differentiated courses at this level."

The emphasis, then, is to be on increased speaking and oral work in elementary classes first, and then later in the intermediate courses. Raimundo Lido, professor of Romance Languages and Literature, agrees that more oral work is vitally needed in elementary teaching. "The epitome of reading is speaking the language; from there you must go on to the ultimate step in facile writing."