Word: foreigner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...