Last time we discussed the need to integrate the later languages man has devised to share his consciousness with the traditional concerns of rhetoric and the new findings of linguistics. This time it may help to consider how the newer media or languages are being used to disseminate the findings of linguistics. For it is my contention that this process of integration will be mutually advantageous. If the newer languages must be submitted to the same rigorous scrutiny the linguists have bestowed on oral languages and that the rhetoricians have given to style in writing, so must the earlier disciplines be satisfied with nothing less than the best use of the newer media.
To illustrate what I mean I want to use as examples five films being distributed by Teaching Films Custodians (25 W. 43rd Street, New York 36, New York). The five half-hour films set out to establish the principles for teaching a foreign language. On the level of information they are truly remarkable. And at a few points they are also eloquent in the way they use the language of motion pictures. But the skill of presentation is not anywhere nearly as impressive as the content is important. I do not mean to imply at all that these films will be useless to teachers trying to understand the fundamentals of teaching a foreign language.
Far from it. I choose these films to talk about precisely because I believe they are valuable treatments of an important subject. They simply don't use the newer medium of movies superlatively. They succumb to a besetting sin of American education: unexceptionable subject matter deadened to greater or lesser degree by insufficient skill with the newer languages. We didn't create this problem, but we must learn to overcome it. Our students are constantly being exposed to just the opposite in most commercial uses of the newer languages, i.e., insufficiently (for our predicament) complex information presented with superlative technique. This is an aspect of the private splendor/public squalor dichotomy John Kenneth Galbraith first brought to wide attention. This imbalance partly explains why we don't seem to catch up with our educational agenda.
To speak directly, then, to the contents of these films, the series reveals with considerable force what one needs to know to apply what linguistics has discovered about the problems of teaching a foreign language. We see contrasting vignettes, for example, of mothers starting small children to learn to speak by songs and repetitive games in French and English. German and Japanese families add to the further sense of diversity a linguist must establish to develop his concepts about relativity.
There are also superlative movie sequences in which international passengers (French, Japanese, and Russian) consecutively ask the same series of questions at old Idlewild's Pan Am Desk: where is Flight 633, may I carry hand luggage aboard, and is dinner served aboard? The camera wonderfully records the mutual dismay of passenger and agent as the former stumbles in an English too heavily patterned by French, Japanese, and Russian. After the problem is established, a simplified animation technique shows visually how the intonation pattern of one language has been superimposed on another, impeding communication.
Other superb uses of film are the closeups of Puerto Ricans drilling away the phonemic patterns of Spanish as they learn to discriminate between "wash" and "watch"; and American students at the University of Minnesota high school shedding English habits as talented teachers drill them in French or Spanish. In fact the camera work in these sequences is so sure and eloquent that it makes the inferior graphics of the "near" movie sequences in these films doubly disturbing.
For example, one well-thought-out sequence establishes the relativity of grammar by showing the bewildering range of differences in so simple a locution as "it rains" as presented in several languages besides English. As the statement is made in French, there is a slide of the Eiffel Tower; in Hindi, of the Taj Mahal; in Japanese, Mt. Fujiyama; and so on. The trouble is that superimposed on these "stills" is a rainmaking image as contrived as to make the attempt at illusion silly. If one can't afford stock film footage of these varied rains, then either find a very, very wet looking image (a half hour at the New York Library Picture Collection) or don't try for the illusion.
Project XX has also shown how to simulate motion with still pictures using a TV camera (actually NBC films them but economically hard-pressed educational TV uses electronic cameras). There is also a sequence in which the bewilderingly varied number of words an African language has for "walking" (walking slowly, rapidly, etc., etc.) is illustrated by a hapless little animated figure changing in clumsy animation against the backdrop of an unchangingly stylized jungle. Every episode of Jetsons further conditions us to reject such far from eloquent craftsmanship. The information is fine, the language clumsy. We bluepencil our students about shifts in tone, inappropriate diction. These are filmic counterparts of those venial sins of the first mass media, language.
Now I hope I have made it clear that I am not snooting these films. I learned a lot from them and highly recommend them, not only to those preparing to teach a foreign language but also to future English teachers (who may in despair early in their careers often decide it is a foreign language to their students). My point about rhetoric, linguistics, and later languages is that all of us can learn from each other.
In fact, a subsidiary benefit from scheduling these films would be to have your classes look at them filmicly. How does the fuzzy flannelboard kind of graphics compare with, say, the work of Saul Bass (Otto Preminger's man with a golden arm)? Would the sequence on an American couple trying to say goodnight in rather pathetically unidiomatic French to a French couple be improved by a cutting that brought into better focus through closeup the hard try of the Americans and the bewilderment of the French? Is it wise to mix media the way they are here, presumably in the interests of economy? The parts of the film that are closer to soundfilmstrips might better be disengaged from the movies. Would expertly edited color slides plus synchronized sound cost less and do more than these black and white films?
I do not mean to endorse a kind of galloping amateurism here in instructional materials. It has just been my impression that the fastest way to heighten the ordinary sensibility to a problem of technique as it reveals the truth is to ask the amateur to try to understand, however dimly, the professional's problems.
The basic issue is to get said what needs to be said in our society forcefully enough so that those who need to hear will hear. That's after all what rhetoric, linguistics, and mass communication boil down to. Saying significant things eloquently. So much needs to be said and there is so little eloquence administering to our needs that we need to raise questions like those I have raised here as an act of gratitude for the films themselves.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 52, No. 7 (Oct., 1963), pp. 536-538
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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