A New Approach to Language Learning for Graduate Students.

OR THE PAST two summers the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Washington State University has offered an unusual German course for graduate students from disciplines other than German studies. The course, German 525 by title, was instituted, ironically enough, at the request of the chairman of one of our natural science departments. While lecturing at Oxford, he discovered himself at a distinct disadvantage during conversations between his English colleagues and their counterparts from the continent. The impressions he formed while listening to his English hosts converse with equal ease in a number of continental languages led him to the conclusion that his students should not have to suffer from the linguistic handicap he had felt. Returning to Washington State, he requested that we devise a course which would teach graduate students the four basic linguistic skills, rather than merely give them the fundamentals of reading in a foreign language. The course we devised has been met with great enthusiasm on all parts of the campus-so great, as a matter of fact, that new students began requesting pre-registration in September (1972) for next summer's course! The immediate goals we established for the course can be stated briefly: 1) to give the students a thorough knowledge of the four skills, a knowledge which would, under normal circumstances, allow them to skip the first two years of our regular program if they desired to continue German studies after the summer semester; 2) to provide them with a sound basic vocabulary (approximately 2,000 words); 3) to accomplish the first two goals in a comfortable setting which was isolated from the rest of the campus and which created, as nearly as possible, an "all German" environment; and 4) to provide students with a thoroughly positive language learning experience, especially since many of them had chosen this particular path, rather than the traditional "reading knowledge only" track, to satisfy a Ph.D. language requirement. In order to achieve the first goal-an active knowledge of the four basic skills-we chose a modified total immersion approach; "modified," because our program had to deal with graduate students who, by and large, were married. These students could not, therefore, be asked to give up their families for a summer semester in order to live in a German House, or, as seems to be traditional in such courses, to spend 12-14 hours a day in class. Instead, our students attended class eight hours per day, five days a week, for a period of eight weeks; in all a total of 320 clock hoursnot academic hours of 50 minutes. During the instructional day no attention was given the otherwise normal class bells. To have done so would have resulted in a substantial loss of v luable time: if we had allowed a ten minute recess each hour, we would have lost one hour and twenty minutes per day, six hours and forty minutes per week or 51 hours and twenty minutes during the eight week session. Stated in different terms, we would have lost nearly eight and one half days or over one full week of instructional time. To compensate somewhat, however, the students were given two ten minute breaks per day, at mid-morning and midafternoon. The real challenge to the staff, which consisted of two faculty members and three teaching assistants,1 came in maintaining an optimal learning experience without major time