When our Secretary, George Winchester Stone, asked me last July to address this meeting on the general topic of language teaching and linguistics, it was only with considerable hesitation that I finally agreed to accept. There has been far too much loose talk recently about the application of linguistics to language teaching, and I did not wish to add to it. In some circles linguistics has turned into a sort of fad. There are those who talk of the “linguistic method” of language teaching, as if to oppose it to some hypothetical “non-linguistic method” used in the benighted past. And at meetings of language teachers, bright young things walk up to me and ask, apparently in all seriousness: “Excuse me, professor, but would you please tell me how linguistics handles the subjunctive?” Needless to say, I have no answers to such questions; they merely embarrass me. Linguistics is not a teaching method, but a growing body of knowledge and theory; and though it may offer helpful answers to some of the problems of language teaching, it surely does not know all the answers.

Not too many years ago if I had been told that I would be addressing this scholarly assembly on the subject of proficiency testing, I would have denied the thought as being synonymous with impeachment proceedings. I would have asserted with calculated dignity that such a subject was too pedestrian for my interests, I would have stated with just the right touch of scorn that such work was the business of social scientists, psychologists, or educationists, in short, to steal a leaf from Bill Parker's book, I would have been willing to “let George do it” or indeed would likely not have cared if it were not done at all. On the offchance that there are some among you who may still feel that same way, I ask you to let me state the case for a project which I have come to regard not only as having a claim to academic status, but one which I believe is worthy of the interest of all who would hold that testing is a proper function of teaching, and that determination of standards of performance within a subject matter field is a primary business of those who have the skills and teach the subjects which are to be evaluated.

The improvement of foreign language teaching in America in the past ten years under the dynamic leadership of the Foreign Language Program of the MLA is a fact in which we can all rejoice. The added impetus, financial and otherwise, provided recently by the National Defense Education Act, has made it possible for the Program, instead of retrenching after the period of Foundation endowment was ended, to expand with unprecedented vigor and effectiveness. The FLP has been active over a broad spectrum of foreign language teaching and learning, but there are areas where its influence has not yet been felt. One of these is the preparation of college and university language teachers.

You have heard three excellent talks on this, the final session of a three-day meeting that will doubtless seem, to some of you, to have begun three weeks ago. Your arches are fallen, your ears are tired, your lungs are filled with convention hotel air, carefully preserved from one annual meeting to the next, wafted from New York to Chicago to Philadelphia. You have reached the point where, in the memorable words of William Riley Parker, the seats are making more impression on the audience than the speeches. You are ready for a foreign-language funny story, and I happen to have one, which I read in the October number of the Newsletter of the Montana FLTA. Mrs. Smith is complaining to Mr. Jones, the principal of her son's school: “Mr. Jones, my Johnny is an intelligent, conscientious boy. He studies hard and he gets good grades in all his subjects, except one, French. He tries and tries, Mr. Jones, but my Johnny simply can not learn that language!” Mr. Jones: “How fortunate, Mrs. Smith, that your Johnny was not born in France!”

This three-part survey of modern foreign language certification requirements and practices, made under a contract with the United States Office of Education authorized under the National Defense Education Act of 1958, utilizes information supplied by Education Department officials on the state and municipal levels. The qualifications here reported and analyzed relate only to the foreign language concentration and do not include academic degree and professional education requirements except in the case of the certification of teachers of foreign languages in the elementary schools (FLES) when the secondary school certificate is especially endorsed for FLES by the addition of training in professional education. Inquiries concerning other information about conditions of certification may be addressed to the Certification Officers listed in this report. The total and wholehearted cooperation which I received from them in conducting this study is gratefully acknowledged.

This report is the result of the first of a series of investigations on the current status of foreign languages in elementary and secondary schools and in institutions of higher learning in the United States. It is a part of the Statistical Research Project of the Modern Language Association of America under a contract from the United States Office of Education, authorized under the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Subsequent reports will present data for 1959 on foreign languages in the elementary schools, in public and independent secondary schools, and in colleges and universities.