Language Boom

>Texas starts Spanish lessons in the third grade, has just issued 75,000 free Spanish textbooks.

>Sixty-eight school systems reported to the Bureau of Education last week that enrollment in Spanish classes had doubled since September.

> In colleges, enrollment in French classes has dropped 23.5%, German 11%.

>Berlitz Schools (languages) have had a 60% enrollment increase in Spanish. French, which was 50% of Berlitz pre-war business, is now only 5%.

>Forty-eight U.S. colleges and universities now have courses in Portuguese.

The demand for Portuguese caught teachers napping. The American Council of Learned Societies last week announced a special teachers' training course (seven weeks' intensive study) at the University of Vermont.

Vermont's course will be based on a teaching method developed by Dr. William Berrien of the Rockefeller Foundation. Without overemphasizing vocabulary or ignoring grammar, Dr. Berrien lets his students live the language, urges them to relate it to their special interests: science, anthropology, economics, etc. He lets them read and talk about what interests them most, guides them to the best literature in their particular fields of interest.

Dr. Berrien doubts whether U.S. colleges and universities will ever accept this intensive method of teaching foreign languages, but he thinks they ought to. Says he: "If we are now lacking engineers, agronomists and economists with a knowledge of Spanish or French, it is not altogether the fault of the U.S. people who can't learn languages' but also partly of educators who have failed to relate language to the activities and interests of men in different fields of work. The materials used heretofore in language teaching have been too exclusively limited to fiction, a good portion of it decidedly second-rate."

Other signs of the boom in foreign languages :

>Courses in Russian at Cornell and Harvard, Moroccan Arabic at Pennsylvania.

> Siamese will be studied at the University of Michigan, which already has 14 students in a course in Malay.

> The Council of Learned Societies is hunting for native speakers of Swahili, hopes that a course, important for communications in Africa, can be started at University of North Carolina.

>Japanese has had a 1000% increase since December. Only a handful of universities (Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Washington, California, Yale, George Washington, a few others) with "qualified teachers" now teach Japanese. All are working at capacity at a stubborn language which requires a year and a half's study before a bright pupil can read a Japanese newspaper.

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