Parallel-Column Bilingual Reading Materials as a Pedagogical Device: An Experimental Evaluation

DURING the past decade the importance of the development of reading comprehension has been deemphasized as a consequence of the increased attention given to the audio-lingual skills. This new focus on the listening and speaking skills was to be expected: first, because the demands of an evershrinking world necessitated that stress be placed upon the aural-oral communication skills, and second, because the findings of the "Coleman Report" of 1929 had resulted in almost exclusive attention to the reading skill. "A contributing factor [leading to a deemphasis of the importance of modern languages in the secondary schools] was the 1924-29 investigation known as the "Modern Foreign Language Study," supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation, which, in an attempt to analyze the situation, especially in the high schools, and to salvage as much as possible, actually served to weaken further the position of modern languages. Many books resulted from this research project; among them word and idiom counts which were to serve as a scientific basis for the preparation of language texts. The most controversial of these publications was The Teaching of Modern Languages in the United States, known as the "Coleman Report," prepared in 1929 by a committee of which Professor Algernon Coleman of the University of Chicago served as secretary. He found that eighty-three percent of American high-school pupils studied a foreign language for only two years. This amount of time be;ng obviously inadequate to acquire all the language skills and to gain an insight into another culture, Coleman concluded that it would be best to concentrate on one skill, reading."' It is not surprising, then, that the need to bring about a balanced development of all four skills should manifest itself in overemphasis on those skills that had been so neglected, namely listening and speaking. Audio-lingual techniques for teaching a foreign language have generally included the intensive practice of dialogues and pattern drills. It was claimed that grammatical structure could be internalized by students who used this kind of practice. Allegedly, through such practice, the student gains control of the foreign language by practicing and adapting the basic sentence patterns which have been "seeded" in linguistically-prepared dialogues. Although there has been much enthusiasm for the increased attention given to the development of the audio-lingual skills, it seems that students are still failing to develop adequate comprehension of foreign languages. "It is true that students are capable of manipulating drills and memorizing dialogues to a very high degree of proficiency. Yet despite the ease with which they perform in this area, not many students can understand and speak the language outside the ordinary classroom situation."2 Now that some ten years have gone by since the passage of the National Defense Education Act which gave impetus to the "audio-lingual approach" to language learning, language teachers are taking a critical look at the results. Students now entering college after several years of high-school language study are giving unquestionable evidence of better performance in the audio-lingual skills. Their pronunciation of the language and functional control of its basic structures are clearly better developed as a result of the audio-lingual program. This improved performance, however, is