Adapting and Writing Language Lessons/Acknowledgments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish first to acknowledge a long-standing debt to the late Arnold E. Irwin, my first teacher in a commonly-taught language, and to the late Edouardo Mondlane, who first introduced me to a seldom-taught one, each of whom taught me language and more than language.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the deans of neglected-language teaching in this country, Bee and Bill Welmers, who over the years have not only pointed the way, but have also cleared much of it with their own hands.
Three Directors of Language Training for the United States Peace Corps have contributed to this project: Allan M. Kulakow by introducing me to International Volunteer Training; John M. Francis by asking the right questions; and Robert J. Rebert by testing some of these answers.
Caleb Gattegno, through intermittent contacts and particularly in a workshop which I attended in February of 1971, has caused me to see all teaching in a new light.
For five years, John A. Rassias of Dartmouth College and I have been adversary-accomplices, each in our frequent meetings reminding the other of that half of our craft which he would most likely forget.
Ronald A. C. Goodison and Panagiotis S. Sapountzis of the Foreign Service Institute, by example and by precept upon precept, have kept me from being satisfied with the direction in which I was going.
Augustus A. Koski, editor of the publications series of the Foreign Service Institute's School of Language Studies expedited the work and provided encouragement at many points.
In 1969, I drafted for the Peace Corps a set of five fascicles on developing materials for language learning. Revisions of some parts of these have entered into Chapters 2, 6, 7 and 8 of this report. The drafts were discussed and tested rather widely during that year: in a workshop for language coordinators from the districts of Micronesia, held in February under the direction of David Burns; during a week of consultation with language and education specialists in Korea, particularly Park, Chang-Hae, Director of Yonsei University's Korean Language Institute, Whang, Chan-Ho, Director of the Language Research Institute at Seoul National University, Lee, Chong-Soo, Dean of the College of Education at the same institution, and my long-time friend and colleague Dwight Strawn; at a two-week workshop for language training specialists for the international volunteer sending agencies of a number of countries, sponsored by the International Secretariat for Volunteer Services in Furudal, Sweden, in June of 1969, at which Gordon Evans was especially helpful; by Clifford H. Prator, Russell N. Campbell, and Lois McIntosh of U.C.L.A., who provided written comments; and in a high-intensity Spanish program conducted for the United States Peace Corps by Elton Anglada in Santiago, Chile.
The heart of this report is to be found in Chapter 3. That chapter was drafted at the very beginning of the project, circulated in successive versions to a large number of people who represented many different parts of the language teaching profession, and was the last part of this book to receive final revision. Those who contributed either written or specific oral comments include:
The late David Trumbull, director of the Master of Arts Program in Teaching Languages, at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Janet Bing, his assistant director;
Hanne Steinmeyer, a foreign language teacher in the public schools of Brattleboro;
Rosalyn Bennett, John Pint, Jean Benton, Ronald Bradley, Barbara Hancock, Anita Herman, Brent Mosher, Marcia Rollin and Susan Stuckey, students in the MATL program at Brattleboro, for thoughtful papers in which they applied the content of Chapter 3 to textbooks with which they were familiar;
Ray Clark, Alvino and Beatrice Fantini, Sarah Loessel, Georg Steinmeyer and Tom Todd of the language faculty at the Experiment in International Living;
Marilyn Barrueta of Arlington, Virginia, a truly outstanding teacher of Spanish at the junior high school level, and frequent resource person in training workshops;
Ernest F. Dunn, Chairman of the Department of Languages and Literature in Livingston College of Rutgers University;
Donald N. Larson, professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, director of the Toronto Institute of Linguistics, and former director of the language program for missionaries in the Philippines, who spent two days in discussion of many of the major parts of this report;
Evelyn Bauer, Marie de Carli, Carol Flamm, Naomi Iseri and Eileen Scott, language specialists on the staff of the Peace Corps in Washington;
Robert W. Blair of Brigham Young University;
Vicki Bunye of the Philippines, director of TEFL training in a Peace Corps training program for Korea, who arranged for me to discuss these matters with her staff;
Julia M. Burks, Deputy Chief of the English Teaching Division of the United States Information Agency; Gloria Kreisher, Program Officer and Ruth Montalvan, English Teaching Consultant in the same Division; Anne Newton, Associate Editor of English Teaching Forum;
John D. Butler, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages, Federal City College;
Dale P. Crowley, Chief of the Language Training Unit of the Center for Cross-Cultural Training and Research, Hilo, whose helpful comments and acts of cooperation are too numerous to mention;
Guillermo and Filomena Peloro del Olmo for careful criticism from the point of view of the audiolingual approach as it is being applied to language teaching in the public schools;
A. C. Denteh, a language specialist and senior language trainer for Peace Corps Volunteers in Ghana;
Hanna Farha, Arabic instructor for the Foreign Service Institute both in its Beirut School and in Washington;
C. Ray Graham, Spanish Language Coordinator at the Escondido Training Center of the Peace Corps;
Tom Hale, supervisor of TESOL in the Department of Education of the State of Hawaii, for his own comments and for arranging a consultation with TESOL coordinators on his staff;
Eva Budar, William Fraser, Robert E. Gibson, Jaynie Oishi and Ethel A. Ward, TESOL coordinators in Hawaii public schools;
Ian Hanna, C. Cleland Harris, Howard Levy, Serge Obolensky, Ben Park, James W. Stone, Lloyd B. Swift and Joann Tench, colleagues on the linguist staff of the Foreign Service Institute;
Arthur Levi, former volunteer and language coordinator for the Peace Corps, now involved in the training of commercial, industrial and diplomatic personnel;
Ron Long, graduate student in linguistics at Indiana University, with experience in language teaching and in materials development for languages of West Africa;
Paul C. McRill, language teaching specialist in the public schools of Seattle, and his colleagues Betty Mace and Jerold Wallen;
John P. Milon, chief language coordinator for a Peace Corps training program in Micronesia in the summer of 1970, and the district language coordinators in the same program, with when I worked on ways of adapting a wide variety of existing materials: Elmer Asher of Kusai, Gary Crawford for Yap, Lino Olopai of Saipan, Ewalt Joseph and Damian Sohl of Ponape, Moses Samwel of the Marshalls, and Sochiki Stephen of Truk. All of these except Crawford had also been participants in the 1969 workshop. Milon later contributed additional comments based on his work in teaching English to small children in Hawaii;
Loren Nussbaum, a veteran materials developer at the Center for Applied Linguistics;
Mary Nussbaum, who arranged for me to discuss the central ideas of this chapter with teachers of English as a Foreign Language in a workshop which she had organized in Northern Virginia;
The language faculty of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, particularly Ted Plaister, Byron Bender, Donald M. Topping, Charles Blatchford, Ruth Crymes and Kenneth Jackson; Richard Day allowed me to discuss an early draft with his staff of TESL teachers and relayed some of their reactions to me;
Laurence and Terry Thompson, who commented on these ideas from the point of view of linguists working with Indians of the Pacific Northwest;
J. V. Powell, a graduate student who was planning a program for young Quileutes who want to learn their tribal language;
Anita Politano, language teacher and trainer of teachers in Hilo, Hawaii;
Kenneth L. Rehg, former language specialist for the Peace Corps in Ponape and currently a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, who made many comments over a long period of time;
J. Richard Reid, Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Clark University, both as a language teacher and as a trainer of teachers;
John M. Thiuri, one of the best language instructors I have seen or heard of, who teaches Swahili at the Foreign Service Institute;
Maria Chapira of the Center for Curriculum Development;
J. Donald Bowen of U.C.L.A., his students Julie Goldberg, Alice Parker Johnson, Antoine Nteziryayo, Sandy Plann and William Wong, and a number of others who are anonymous, for an extraordinarily helpful set of criticisms.
Most of the above-named people also commented on other parts of the manuscript in addition to Chapter 3.
Helpful suggestions regarding other sections of the report came from:
Marianne Adams, Madeline E. Ehrman, James R. Frith, Margaret Omar and Allen I. Weinstein of the Foreign Service Institute;
Claudia P. Wilds of the Center for Applied Linguistics;
Howard McKaughan of the University of Hawaii;
James Karambelas, teacher of Russian at the Pingry School;
Many participants in the Language Coordinators Workshop conducted by the Language Research Foundation in Rockport, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1970;
H. David McClure, recently returned from two years as language training specialist for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone;
Albert R. Wight, of the Center for Research and Education;
The principal ideas of this book were further tested in two workshops in New Jersey: one at Fairleigh Dickinson University arranged by Sr. Margherita Marchione and Guillermo del Olmo, and one at Glassboro State College arranged by Jacqueline Benevento, both under the auspices of the New Jersey Foreign Language Teachers Association;
Some of the ideas for augmenting Spanish Programmatic Course grew out of a visit to the Peace Corps training center in Ponce, Puerto Rico, under the direction of Ron Schwartz.
Sources of materials for adaptation, or of major contributions to the project itself, were:
Kenneth L. Rehg (Chapter 3); Alvino and Beatrice Fantini (Appendix A); Judith Beinstein and Ray Clark (Appendix B); John Kane and Mary Kirkland (Appendix C); C. Cleland Harris (Appendix D); Lucia Anzuini, Allen Brooks, Byron Caldwell, Gerard and Minou de Balyon and William Lovelace (Appendix E); Beatrice F. and William E. Welmers (Appendix F); Dorothy Rauscher (Portuguese Materials in Chapter 4); Sutira Ariyapongse (Appendix G); Ann M. Reid and John Thiuri (Appendix H); Smitty and Guaraciema Dorsey (Appendix I); Lucia Anzuini, Richard Casanova, Raúl Holguin and Ray Paz (Appendix J); Allen Brooks (Appendix F); Warren G. Yates (Appendix M); John Indakwa and John Thiuri (Appendix N); Raymond Setukuru (Appendix O); Arthur Levi, Ernest F. Dunn, Warren G. Yates and Souksomboun Sayasithsena (Chapter 6); Fritz Frauchiger (Appendix P); Carolyn Jackson and John Thiuri (Appendix Q); Kenneth L. Rehg and Damian Sohl (Appendix R); Frederick K. Kamoga (Appendix S); E. Chacha Ndissi (Appendix U).
William Higgins and Richard Thompson of the United States Office of Education provided constructive sympathy and encouragement from the very beginning of this project to its end, and Bernard Penny of the Foreign Service Institute provided equally constructive skepticism over the same period of time.
Many friends and colleagues have contributed to this project in ways which were less direct and identifiable, but no less appreciated.
The United States Office of Education underwrote the preparation of this report, but much of the illustrative material is taken from work done under the auspices of the Peace Corps and the Foreign Service Institute; the Teacher Corps sponsored one of the projects, under the aegis of Manuel Reyes Mazon.
Typing was done by Irma C. Ponce, Ethel P. Fagot, Donna J. Janes, Kathryn A. Carlson and Curt Wilbur.
The FSI Audio-Visual staff, under the direction of Thomas E. Bower, assisted in the arrangement of the illustrations contained in the book, and made many useful suggestions on general format during the preparation of the text for publication. The drawings in Appendix G are by Souksomboun Sayasithsena, the photographs in Appendix C were taken by Carl Stench, and those in Appendix Q were provided by the Peace Corps.
I would like to thank the following authors and publishers for permission to quote non-technical materials:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for lines from 'The Well-dressed Man with a Beard' by Wallace Stevens; Frederick Seidel for lines from 'The Last Entries in Mayakovsky's Notebook;' William Stafford for lines from 'Freedom;' Random House, Inc. for lines from W. H. Auden's 'Their Lonely Betters,' in his Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957; Cambridge University Press for the quotation at the beginning of Chapter 6, taken from G. C. Coulton, Social Life in Britain.
The quotations in Chapter 9 are from W. H. Auden, Dave Hamelech, and William T. Bard.
Final thanks are due to my family, for their patience with my frequent travel, and for allowing me to write much of this book on their time.
Arlington, Virginia
June, 1971