 I am Captain Robert Watson. I serve in the Army of the Agenonics of Statov. My daughter is from Massachusetts, and I started to learn Russian as a student. I was born in New York. I was 10 years old. I was born in Chicago, Illinois. I was 10 years old. I was born in New York. I was 10 years old. Soil is our hint of truth in the West Area of Statov's Midos. I have started studying Spanish for a lot of those places. I am Captain Robert Watson. I was born in New York. I was 10 years old. I was born in New York. I was 30 years old. I am Captain John L. of the Navy of the Republic of Korea. As I hope you can tell, the language I am speaking is English. These men and thousands of others from all of America's armed forces and those of many foreign nations are involved in an intensive language training program unique in military history. It's a program involving some 65 languages and major dialects, from Arabic to German, from Korean to Serbo Croatian, from English to Vietnamese. America's role as a leading nation on a shrinking planet made this program a necessity. And today, the big picture examines how the Army and her sister services are building language power for peace. The headquarters of the Defense Language Institute is here at Anacostia in Washington, D.C. From these unpretentious looking buildings, it's directed and monitored a teaching activity that has centers at many military installations across the country and at some 50 nations overseas. It is a language training effort of a scope and proven effectiveness that has never been known before. Within the United States, D.L.I. has four resident school operations spread across the continent. One of these, the East Coast branch, is co-located with the headquarters at Anacostia. It provides basic courses in 10 languages. These include Arabic, German, Vietnamese, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, French, and Portuguese. Compared to the D.L.I.'s other resident school operations, the East Coast branch functions on a fairly small scale. Just over 300 resident students per year. However, the East Coast branch also administers or monitors language training in the Washington area by contract language schools for some 1,600 additional students each year in about 50 different languages. In California, is the Defense Language Institute's West Coast branch at the Presidio of Monterey. The Presidio is one of the oldest military posts in the United States looking down from high ground to the scenic Monterey harbor below. Here in 1846, Commodore John Drake Sloath landed and raised the American flag to claim California for the United States. D.L.I.'s West Coast branch is not only its largest school, it is in fact the largest language school in the world today. It graduates more than 5,000 students each year and teaches a total of 25 foreign languages. The Institute's English Language School is located at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas. Actually, though English is the language taught here, it is a foreign language to every one of the students at this particular school. This facility teaches English to some 2,500 foreign military personnel each year. The more than 40 overseas countries they have come to take a basic and specialized 15-week course in preparation for their going to various United States service schools for military or technical training. This school, through the military assistance program, has also been instrumental in setting up more than 300 military language programs to teach English in 50 countries around the world. In fact, most students who come here have first attended one of these schools in their home country. To give them a start at one of the world's most difficult but most popular languages, English. A Fort Residence School has been set up at Fort Bliss, Texas. The Defense Language Institute's support command. This school was set up to accommodate the vastly increased demand for training in Vietnamese. Actually, Vietnamese is only moderately difficult for an American to learn. Not as easy as Spanish, for example, but not as hard as Chinese. Vietnamese only seems a bit baffling at first because it is a tonal language. A given word can have several different meanings, depending on the tone used in speaking it. So whether in programs which include only one language, as here at the support command, or at other branches of DLI where the language is number in the dozens, the objective is the same. To give American service people a new link of direct communication with people of other nations. The more than 12,000 Institute students who graduate each year do not learn their new languages by themselves. The hundreds of teachers who make up the DLI faculty are a key element in the remarkable success of this unique program over the years. To teach any given language at DLI, the teacher must first be an educated native speaker of that language. But in fact, it isn't uncommon for members of this faculty to be able to express themselves in as many as six different languages. Among their number are descendants of royalty, prominent artists, musicians, statesmen, educators, judges, former government officials. They are uniquely qualified for their specialized mission and they fulfill it in a uniquely effective way. These are basic and the ACT course? Not ACT anymore, but they have intermediate courses. Their students are selected members of all four armed forces. They spend from 24 to 47 weeks completely absorbed in the business of taking in the new language. And taking in is the right phrase. They get the feel of the language, the flavors of it. They make it their own. Just how this comes about is quite a story. For the student, it begins like this. When the new arrival first sees the volume of material he's going to work with, he's glad to remember that while he's here, his primary military duty is to learn his assigned language. It'll be a busy time and every hour of it is planned long before he gets here. They are ready for him. Texts have been created from scratch by the school itself to lead the student hour by hour through the hundreds of hours of instruction. DLI not only writes its own teaching texts, it prints them and this is no small-scale operation. Well over half a million texts each year and each book lesson has its counterpart recorded on tape. In order for each student to be able to hear his homework as well as read it, teachers put in many hours of painstaking work in DLI's recording studios. These tapes give the student a clear, correct speech model to imitate as he works on his own outside the classroom. From each master recording, hundreds of copies are made and these become as much a part of the student's equipment as his textbooks. They are in fact textbooks for the ear, an essential part of DLI's teaching technique. Educational television is another of the tools used by the Language Institute in its intensive training. Students may act the role of newscasters or there may be an interview session by a video tape. This cannot replace but it can certainly aid the face-to-face teaching, which is the primary tool, by bringing into the classroom situations not normally available. And while students are watching the video tape, an instructor can also be teaching a live class somewhere else. And the first thing to notice about a DLI class is how small it is. Rarely as many as 10 people, usually less. This is essential if each and every student is to get the benefit of intensive, individualized instruction. Very good. The institute teaches by the audio-lingual approach. The first step of which is to introduce the students simply to the sounds of the spoken language, as heard in real situations. Listen, repeat, mimic, memorize, over and over and over. At first the student is encouraged not to ask why, but to repeat, not to translate, but to think in the new language, to hear and immediately imitate. Repeat, repeat, repeat. As the learning progresses, the students learn more complex sentences. Structure and grammar are gradually introduced in terms of dialogue and pattern drills, not through emphasis on rules of grammar as such. The emphasis on real-life flavor carries throughout the teaching. Mr. Mayer, I'd like to thank you for a most enjoyable afternoon. Herr Bürgermeister, ich möchte Ihnen für einen schönen Nachtstag danken. Ich habe Ihnen zu danken, Sie waren so freundlich und die Sportgeräte für das Eisenhaus für Verstärkung zu stellen. I must thank you. It was so friendly of you to donate the sports equipment for our orphanage. I'm glad we could help you. Es freut mich, Dr. Hilsen-Kirnten. The boys in your band are really playing with gusto. The version in Ihre Capella spielen mit viel Spaß. Ja, sie spielen auch mit Schwung. Unsere Brauerei tut alles, um sie bei guter Laune zu halten. They're playing with a lot of energy. Our local brewery is doing everything possible to keep them in the right mood. Sehr gut, aber ich möchte doch einige Kleinigkeiten berichtigen. They learn in terms of authentic sentences, not isolated words and rules. And once they have gained confidence in using the spoken language, the next step is to acquire the written language. Before this student graduates, he will be able to converse, translate, read a newspaper or military publication in Korean. To acquire this level of proficiency in months instead of years takes precisely what DLI provides, intensive training. And intensive is the right word. Three hours of class instruction every morning and every afternoon three more hours. That's three hours at home each night. Nine hours a day, the equivalent of one to two weeks of normal college instruction every day. Thirty-seven to forty-seven weeks of instruction at this level of intensity is a lot of learning. In addition to face-to-face instruction, perhaps DLI's most important single teaching tool is the language laboratory. The students spend one or two hours each day working in this electronic learning environment. He can listen to the language correctly spoken on tape. Repeat, play back his own voice for comparison to the correct model, all at his own pace. He needn't wait for slower students or be rushed by quicker ones. The instructor can listen in to any booth, speak to any booth without disturbing the others or speak to all at once. The language lab provides an essential element of language training with minimum demand upon the valuable time of its teachers. It provides endless, tireless, repetition of correct speech patterns for the student to hear and imitate. Once a week, the students stand in section in ranks. This is one of the very few military duties aside from learning their assigned language that DLI students have. It would be hard to find another instance in which a single formation of military men on duty would include the uniforms of all four services, as this one does. Day by day, in class and out of it, DLI gives the student a whole new frame of reference that reinforces his learning of the spoken and written language by surrounding him with the feel of the culture out of which that language comes. Two types of Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, languages of Thailand, Tibetan, and Vietnam. All of these are on the list of far Eastern languages DLI offers. Today, of course, the one in greatest demand is Vietnamese. At the West Coast branch, classes are sometimes held in the Oriental Garden. In this setting, the students may find still clearer focus for his grasp of the new language. Gradually, the new language becomes more than just a jumble of sound symbols. It becomes a mental fabric in which language and the ideas it conveys are interwoven. An expression of thought is instinctive. The school has created three such cultural environments of gardens. In addition to this Oriental setting, there is the Mediterranean Garden which provides a sort of composite impression of the Mediterranean cultures and traditions. The clear water of the pool at its center. The typical stylized design of gracefully curved walkways. The colors and fragrance of Mediterranean plants and trees all add their bit to the overall impression. The third garden is the Papio Ibero Americano. This is typical of garden design in the Iberian peninsula with its central fountain and Murray-style blue tile. Here an 80th speaker of Spanish or Portuguese would find around him visual reminders of the cultural traditions out of which his language has come. And so do those learning a Latin language for the first time. All this is more than just an effort on the part of the institute to provide appropriate landscaping. It is part of the teaching philosophy to immerse the student in every way possible in the culture, the outlook and customs of the language area he is studying. And this effort is made not only in visual terms but is consciously used as a tool to bring to the students the feel of various languages and cultures. Each day there are two ten-minute periods of foreign music both indoors and outdoors. The nationality of the music has changed daily and this too with an integral part of DLI's teaching program. Here in the new buildings of the East Slavic Division the prime interest of course is Russian. Here we will read and translate the Russian newspaper Novere Ruske Slovo. Specialist Smith, you please read in Russian and you specialist Jones, translate. Zryf na elektrystansis Bostonia Explosion at an electrical station in Boston, Boston, 26 March. Zryf na elektrystansis Bostonia prize the show Zryf. On Tuesday morning at an electrical station in Boston there was an explosion. A doctor talk of pre-christilis. Pre-christilis. Pre-christilis. Pre-christilis. Pre-christilis. Pre-christilis. Among the languages taught by DLI, Russian is second only to Vietnamese in terms of the numbers of students involved. The use of realia is an important part of the learning process at DLI. A lot of good tricks and tricks. Do you want a big box or a small box? How much is a small box? A small box is two. The alia is a term used to describe such real-life setups as this Russian retail store. The products are Russian products currently sold in Soviet stores. All right, give me a small box, please. Students played a part of clerks and customers interchangeably using ad-lib conversational Russian throughout. This takes the student to step beyond the prepared dialogues in class. Gives him a more vivid sense of reality. And so it goes on. Sometimes the setting will be a travel agency or a bank. But the objective of this educational play-acting is always the same. Give the student that extra touch of realism that will focus his grasp of the language even more clearly. DLI's realia concept takes many in varied forms, reaching even into the kitchen. Does the student learning to speak Greek, for example, gain a fuller insight from learning to prepare traditional Greek foods? DLI thinks so and makes this a part of the curriculum. All of the various language departments make use of this culinary language lab. The practical results justify the effort and time involved. In fact, foods prepared here often provide part of the menu for picnics, at which national holidays of the nation involved are celebrated. And the full flavor of normal social contact and conversation in the subject language can be experienced by the students. It is encouraging to a student to find that it is becoming natural to joke, laugh, enjoy all in the new language. It is fun, a break from classroom routines. But even here the learning process goes on and occasions like this are a carefully calculated part of DLI's purpose. Intensive, day in, day out exposure of the student to the living language he is studying in the context of its culture and tradition. The specialized terminology of the military also gets a workout in terms of Rialio. Like this sand table exercise in observation, analyzing a field equipment, movement, terrain feature. All of these aspects together make up a teaching program that gets results. But the search for still greater teaching effectiveness never stops. Experimentation with CAI, Computer Assisted Instruction is just one element of that continuing search. In certain phases of instruction this type of electronic teaching may prove invaluable. It works like this. The student notifies the distant computer that he is ready to begin work. The computer types out the first question, or example, a sentence in English, which the student is to translate into Russian. Then the student types the Russian translation. Immediately the distant computer types back. But it types only the correct part of the student's answer. Any wrong parts are left blank. The student retypes correcting his error immediately, which is of course one key to effective learning. The computer types out an immediate indication that he is right and presents him with the next example. The student works at his own pace and his instructor is a computer miles away, which is at the same time teaching all the other students in the room individually at their own pace. The project is experimental, but the idea offers promise and DLI leaves no possibility unexplored. The men and women graduates of DLI schools, for the most part, have attained what the institute calls the minimum professional proficiency. But that is no slight praise. It means that the man can readily take part in any general conversation in his new language. That his vocabulary is large enough that he rarely has to grope for a word or expression. That his grammar is good. And while he may speak with an American accent, he can speak fluently and read and write the new language with almost normal speed and ease. He is in short ready to take on the military job that requires his linguistic ability. And this is true not only of the American serviceman that DLI has taught a foreign language, but of hundreds of foreign service people to whom the institute has taught English. The graduate of the Defense Language Institute, whatever his branch of service and wherever his new duty assignment may take him, has taken a major step forward, both professionally and as an individual. He has broadened his comprehension of the world he lives in and acquired a vital new ability to communicate with it. Wherever he goes from here, his subintensive language training has equipped him to be, as one among many thousands, the wielder of a highly effective instrument. The armed forces ever growing, language power fall deep.