The FI Program in 1963

Extract

Describing a year's activity in a half-hour report is an annual challenge that grows more difficult as the pace and scope of the activity increase. The Foreign Language Program is in some ways the victim of its success. One of our early goals was to become an information center and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Requests for materials, information, opinions, and assistance threaten to overwhelm us daily. Three members of the staff do nothing but answer these requests. The ones that are unanswerable are put in my in-basket. Telephone calls and visitors multiply. All this activity we are tempted to think of as interruptions to our real job, long-range planning, deep thinking, foreign languages in the next century. But in a very real sense the magnitude of the interruptions to our job is the sign that we are succeeding, that more and more foreign-language teachers and students and more and more people in general want to know the answers to questions and the solutions to problems of which they were hardly conscious a few years ago. There has been a revolution in language learning in this country and among recent visitors to our office have been language teachers and administrators from all over the world (France, England, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Africa, Australia), who have come to find out what we are doing.