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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
I am happy to report to you that the Report of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages has at last been published. It is 326 pages long, a foot high and a foot wide; our printer and staff have affectionately subtitled it “The Monster.” The fullest and most varied report on foreign-language activities produced in our time, it contains twenty-one of the twenty-eight surveys and studies that the MLA undertook in 1959-61 under contract with the U. S. Office of Education through the National Defense Education Act. Here are a few of its highlights. From the 1959-60 FLES survey report, we know that over a million and a quarter children were studying a foreign language from Kindergarten through Grade 8, nearly a million of them below Grade 7. A little over two thirds of these (671,000) were studying in regular programs, with the classroom teacher or a visiting specialist as the model. The remainder (327,000) were learning from a television teacher. Spanish and French accounted for 95% of the enrollments, Spanish with over three-fifths of the total and French with a little over a third.
An address given at the General Meeting on the Foreign Language Program in Chicago, 29 December 1961.