The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

One graduate of the program attributes the problem to the fact that the creators of the materials and curriculum were from the former Soviet Union, where education is based on rote memorization, with little focus on practical use and virtually no tolerance for different learning styles. Program alumni tell of instructors who handed out help- ful photocopied supplements while begging the students not to tell anyone, lest they be disciplined for deviating from the established system. As one officer describes the Russian program’s stan- dard approach, “There is an almost complete absence of the interactive, back-and-forth dialogues that have iden- tified FSI’s traditionally successful programs. Students are expected to memorize a long series of paragraphs on various subjects, then tie them together in some hopeful- ly cohesive way for use in the language tests.” He concludes: “Most students would prefer a more dynamic and flexible program … to meet individual instructor and student styles. But typically, the program administrators refuse to move students around after their initial level has been assessed.” Uneven teaching standards. Too much “free-form” class time is also a problem. Many Arabic-language stu- dents report they never receive a syllabus, and that some of their instructors either do not have or do not follow a lesson plan. “Across the board, what I found was that there was no consistency in approach, and no particular standard curriculum for spoken Arabic past the first few weeks of alphabet study,” one says. Some Arabic-language teachers reportedly plow through the textbook regardless of whether the class has mastered the material, while others spend much of each session engaged in free conversation (typically with the one or two students in each group who are most advanced, leaving the others out in the cold). At the same time, some of the more goal-oriented students express frustration about not knowing what skills they are expected to acquire in each class, let alone the timetable for upcoming units. One FSO comments: “We were left to the whims of each language teacher, each with different backgrounds and qualifications (some with no more qualification than that they spoke Arabic as a native language), and more important, each with a different idea about what is impor- tant for the student to learn about the language. So we left the institute with no systematic approach to teaching about grammar, no systematic approach to the vocabulary set, and no real sense of what the goal of instruction was, other than to expose the learner to a very mixed bag of high-level professional vocabulary. For a language as complex and different as Arabic, this approach is neither appropriate nor efficient, and after nine months of study, an average learner can still barely master everyday, utili- tarian language use. No wonder it takes two years to get to a 3/3 level. I have to ask what Middlebury College could do with someone after two years of intensive study.” Taking “test” too literally? One French-language student probably speaks for many when he recalls his final exam, “The test was high-stress — I felt the testers were trying to find out what I didn’t know, not what I did know.” He also points out that his 16-week test score was 2+/2+ (5 being a native speaker) in speaking/reading, as was his final score after 30 weeks of instruction. Yet he scored a 2+/3 at the 26-week mark. He wonders: “If it is the professional opinion of FSI that I made no progress in spoken French in three months, why didn’t anyone give me any written comments on why?” A related theme is that FSI language instruction seems to be geared more to achieving a target test score — typ- ically 3/3 for world languages, 2/2 for “incentive” lan- guages — than actually enabling students to use the lan- guage in the field. While some instructors go out of their way to obtain or even formulate supplemental vocabulary lists for their students, or direct them to commercial sources for such materials, all too often students are left to their own devices. Part of the problem, speculates one FSO who taught English as a second language for many years, may be the belief that the Foreign Service’s requirements are so spe- cific and unique that the curriculum and methodology have to be custom-made for FSI. Yet even if one accepts this premise, the institute does not seem to have the internal capacity to produce state-of-the-art training materials, much less to stay ahead of the curve in the area of language instruction. As this FSO notes, “While basic knowledge about how people acquire foreign languages has not changed much, today’s language teachers at the best institutions have available to them much better texts and methodologies.” So why doesn’t FSI? A corollary, says one recent graduate of the Arabic pro- gram, is the belief that FSI can “shortcut the language- learning process” and move a student to higher-function vocabulary and complex political concepts without [first] bringing the student through basic language acquisition F O C U S 26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5