The New Function of Modern Language Teaching

Extract

As teachers of the modern languages, in our survey of our own Association and of the American university system, we must all feel a certain warmth of exhilaration. The progress that our favorite studies have been making is so splendid. Within that period of forty years which the memory of older men among us can now cover, and, for the younger men, in each of the periods into which those forty years could be divided, there has been, in a steady current of progress, so vast an improvement in our methods of instruction, so vast an increase in the magnitude of our work, in the number of our pupils, in the size and qualification of our professorial force. In the national movement of thought and theory in education, we have shared, indeed, with the physical sciences in popular favour; and even as compared with the physical sciences themselves, the growth of instruction in the modern languages has been, I think, the more rapid and the more impressive. Excluded at first, or hardly recognized, as a factor in liberal education, they have now made good their position, in all grades of instruction, in school and college and university. In generous proportion with the financial means of each academic body, the work has from year to year been more highly specialised. Almost everywhere, we have witnessed the establishment of the natural division between Romance and Teutonic philology, and between linguistics and literature; and almost everywhere we have witnessed, in logical connexion with the same movement, the study of English placed in its worthy position, as connecting link between those great forces of literary culture that have formed our speech and our literature. There is not, I think, in the world a country where the boy or the girl, born into the use of one of the great modern languages, can move onward more easily and more surely into the knowledge and enjoyment of two or three others.