'Fortune' Gives 'U' Language Courses Praise

Fortune Gives 'U' Language Courses Praise
Article Mentions Accomplishments Of Fries And Yamagiwa
Revolutionary methods in the teaching of languages at leading universities throughout the country, with particular reference to courses at Ann Arbor, are described in an article entitled, "Science Comes To Languages," in the August issue of Fortune magazine.
The writer points out the inability of past methods in language instruction in American high schools and colleges to furnish language. “Americans, millions of whom have done time in high school or college language courses without acquiring any real skill, need no longer apologies Locally assume a predestined monolingualism,” he said.
The new methods utilize linguistic science, that of studying the actual physical characteristics in foreign speech. Natives of Malaya, Burma, Germany, Japan, China and so on are used for instruction and for bases upon which textbooks are written.
"The miracles are not confined to speaking," said the writer of the article in Fortune. An educational achievement tester found at the University of Wisconsin that men trained to speak soon reached a point where they surpassed the U. S. reading norms of men who had spent comparable time solely on learning to read. Navy Japanese courses at Boulder and Ann Arbor, which aim to teach writing as well as speaking, used the same reading text. "But at Ann Arbor, where the senior instructor is Joseph K. Yamagiwa, a Nisei linguistic scientist, use of the book was postponed for six weeks while the men learned to speak some Japanese. A test revealed that the Michigan men made better reading progress than the Boulder men," the article states.
Dr. Charles C. Fries of the University English department is also mentioned in the article because of his work done at the University in teaching Latin-American students to speak and read English. According to the writer, “the students learn to speak and understand English in two intensive months, facilitated by the English speaking milieu of Ann Arbor, and have gone on to study in U. S." engineering and forestry schools, and even in liberal arts and law, at whose very hearts lies the nature of the English language."
The economic factor in the new scientific teaching is used by standard teachers as an argument against the new methods. They say that linguistic scientists' courses are costly and that few school boards or even colleges will adopt them. The economic problem, however, might be solved by spreading the work over longer periods and obtaining the same results but in more time.
Post-war plans for the exchange of students from other countries with American students are being discussed as a possibility of exchange learning and teaching of languages.