| By Jim Bernhardt
The author chairs the Department of Asian, African and Slavic Languages.
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 hen I was invited to join the Foreign Service Institute, I had some very clear ideas about the place. I first heard of the institute and its method for testing foreign language proficiency in a graduate seminar on testing and evaluation. That was about five years before the oral proficiency test swept the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages. By the early 1980s, university foreign language professionals, believing they were following a Foreign Service Institute system, jumped on the proficiency bandwagon, attending seminars, discussing numbers for students’ language skills and whether Henry Kissinger’s English merited a five.
When I joined the institute in 1987 as the Russian and Ukrainian language supervisor, I had doubts about proficiency as a concept and FSI’s ability to produce good speakers of other languages. In academia, the common belief was that the United States had lost Iran, in part, because “none of our diplomats could speak Farsi.” And after several years of debates about Kissinger’s English, I had become a member of the anti-proficiency camp.
The School of Language Studies I discovered in the summer of 1987 was more interesting and diverse than I expected. The school had, in fact, refrained from joining the latest national proficiency fad. It improved but did not fundamentally revise the Department’s system of language testing, incentive languages and language-designated positions, clearly understanding the centrality of the continuity of the system to the work of the institute and the Foreign Service.
In 1987, the institute was on the threshold of major change. The school had begun planning its move to Arlington Hall in earnest. Under the leadership of Secretary George Shultz, the Department finally moved the institute from rented office space in Rosslyn to a new facility. It opened Oct. 13, 1993, at the corner of George Mason and Arlington Boulevards. At long last we would be able to conduct language lessons without stopping every two or three minutes for airplane noise.
Meanwhile, following the October 1986 expulsion of Soviet employees from our embassy in Moscow, the Russian section grew. The institute began teaching Russian to the American replacements for Soviet workers-plumbers from Oklahoma, electricians from Texas, city planners from Colorado and graduate students from Berkeley, along with traditional Foreign Service officers and military personnel.
The institute experienced other changes. As the bipolar world order unraveled, we added new programs and changed old ones. The School of Language Studies enhanced Russian language training, expanded Ukrainian and added programs for 13 other languages of the former Soviet republics. The school also added language programs for the nations of Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Mongolia, Slovakia and Slovenia and revived programs in Khmer and Vietnamese.
One of the challenging tasks associated with opening some 20 new language sections was finding teachers who were well-educated native speakers, people who had spent at least 24 months of the last 10 years in their countries. We hoped to find people who understood the grammars of their languages and were creative enough to play a significant role in developing materials.
We succeeded by employing a variety of methods. We advertised in the papers, had interns go to the Library of Congress to find fraternal organization phone numbers, called churches and mosques and even stopped tourists on the street. I talked to two Kyrgyz tourists at the Arlington County Saturday morning farmer’s market to find out if they lived in the area or were staying with relatives who had moved to Arlington from Kyrgyzstan. I recognized them by the hats they wanted to sell. Only for Mongolian did we have to go to the country to find a qualified candidate. We’re still working on solving the problem of computer fonts for many of these languages.
A language lab at FSI.
Our experiences during the fall of communism resembled those during the Kennedy administration, when the school developed African language materials to support expanded interest in that continent. Under the direction of Earl W. Stevick, the institute hired native speakers to produce materials in Amharic, Chinyanja, Igbo, Kirundi, Kituba, Lingala, Luganda, More, Shona, Swahili, Twi and Yoruba. While many of these materials are still used around the nation, only Amharic and Swahili remain at the institute. Mulugeta Andualum and John Thiuri, who teach Amharic and Swahili respectively, were hired for the African development project in the early 1960s and remain on the staff today.
When you read a magazine ad promising that you can learn to speak like a diplomat using Foreign Service Institute materials, the company is hawking books and tapes produced here in the early 1960s.
As of January, Russian was the largest of the school’s 58 language sections. (The top five are Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic and French.) Surprisingly, this differs little from 1949, when the top five of the 36 language sections offered were French, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. For most of the intervening years, Spanish and French were easily the largest sections. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the largest section was Vietnamese. It even had its own bureaucracy, the Viet-Nam Training Center.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism caused the second major upheaval in the institute’s history. The first sea change emerged in the mid-1950s. The early years provided the context for that change.
In 1946 the Division of Training Services recruited Henry Lee Smith Jr. (1913-72) to create a School of Language Studies. Mr. Smith, best known for his pioneering work in phonetics, helped develop the U.S. Army method for learning languages. Some sources credit Smith with the idea of having native speakers record lists of words with pauses for repetition by students.
Mr. Smith became deputy director of the institute in 1947, in charge of the School of Languages. The plans for language training in the early years, detailed in the institute’s second annual report (1949), were “to provide as much skill in foreign languages as possible for all officers and to teach language in such a way that maximum insight into the psychological patterns of the population involved is provided.”
Best known of the early specialists in “psychological patterns” was Edward T. Hall. Before coming to the school in 1950, Mr. Hall worked as an archeologist and as a field anthropologist. Professor Hall is most well known for his books, The Silent Language (1959) and The Hidden Dimension (1966), both published after he left the institute in 1955. One scholar claims that the fields called intercultural communication and nonverbal communication emerged from Mr. Hall’s methods for training diplomats.
Professors Smith and Hall left FSI shortly after the publication of a report from the Secretary’s Public Committee on Personnel, chaired by Henry M. Wriston. The Wriston committee and later groups deplored “the institute’s pedestrian preoccupation with job mechanics” and stressed the need for greater proficiency in languages, the need for more up-to-date materials for language instruction and more experts.
In 1959, the proficiency test became mandatory for all officers. Each officer was required to take a test during home leave, and no one could be issued travel orders without taking the test. During the early years of language testing, the names of officers scoring a proficiency level of three or better were published in State Magazine.
Over the last 50 years, the School of Language Studies has grown and changed. The school switched from anthropological linguistics to proficiency-based intensive instruction, created a testing system that has become the standard for much of the nation, the NATO countries and Australia and produced textbooks for dozens of languages.
My April 1987 job interview with the institute was a taxing experience. I took two tests back to back: the first in Russian, the second in Polish. While my speaking score in Russian was double my score in Polish, I was proudest of my 2+ in Polish. I learned Polish in Pani Dobrowolska’s kitchen on the west side of Warsaw and from my ninth-grade English students at Warsaw’s Copernicus High School. As I flew back to Ohio that year, I was pleased that the Foreign Service Institute’s proficiency test measured my success in Polish. I decided to take the job.
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