A ONEYEAR COURSE IN CHEMICAL GERMAN Is a one-year college German course for chemists and chemical engineers worth while? An experiment in such a course at the Unierersity of Minnesota with engineering students has been unexpectedly successful. The course begins at once with chemical German prose, taking u p only most necessary essentials of grammar and emphasizing particularly sentence structure and thought content. In the final quarter of the course the students are reporting on articles read in German chemical journals. The importance of the study of technical German as a tool for chemists and chemical engineers is universally recognized and yet the pressure of a constantly increasing number of supposedly more essential courses has gradually been crowding German courses in our chemistry and chemical engineering departments to the wall. It is not an easy language to learn, a t least in comparison with the Romance languages, and the general feeling is that unless a t least two or three years can be devoted t o it, the time spent is largely wasted. But the exigencies of the course schedule for chemical students will not allow the devotion of so much time to the study; therefore, in many institutions the language has been eliminated altogether from the schedule. In some institutions there might be found a place for the subject if it could be reduced t o a year or a year and a half. Is a course of that length worth while? Possibly the following discussion may prove of some value as the testimonial of an experiment. Several years ago the chemical engineering department a t the LTniversity of Minnesota was confronted with the problem indicated above. The course for chemical engineers a t that time was devoting two years t o German, the first year's work including the usual beginning course, drill in grammar and easy stories, and the second, special chemical prose. The introduction of new courses in the schedule made i t necessary to cut down this time to one year. The German department was, therefore, confronted with the problem of giving chemical engineers a so-called reading knowledge of chemical German in one year of four recitation hours per week. It was understood that this was experimental, and if unsuccessful, German might be eliminated altogether. This situation naturally entailed an entire revision of the procedure in giving the course. In consultation with Professor Charles A. Manu of the chemical engineering department it was decided, in the first place, that the one year's work previously devoted to oral, conversational, grammatical drill work, the reading of easy stories, etc., would have to be dispensed with entirely. The student would have to devote himself exclusively to a vocabulary of chemical German. Consequently, chemical German in the form of reading material, treating simple laboratory experi2411
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ments, was introduced from the first day. The work began with the usual drill on pronunciation, the students being held to a great deal of oral reading, both individual and in concert, especially during the first quarter. The purpose of this was naturally to make use of the ear as an important factor in learning the foreign language. The reader used (Fiedler-Sandbach, "A First Course in Science German" Oxford Press, London and New York) contained a very brief summary of the essential grammatical forms for reference. This, supplemented by additional material by the teacher with occasional manipulations of verb and noun forms, i. e., changing a sentence or phrase into other tenses, or singular forms to plural, etc., represented the only purely grammatical work of the course. The stress from the beginning was put on a comprehension of the material read with the analysis of the sentence structure. The lessons took up certain grammatical points each day, these being illustrated in the reading material. In the first quarter, in somewhat over forty lessons, the essential grammatical material was covered, including especially the attributive participial construction and passive voice, so common in expository chemical prose, and also the most common uses of the subjunctive in this type of prose. This was a big dose of grammatical material to assimilate (possibly too big), due to the fact that we were following the reading material in the text and reading that through in one quarter. A better disposition of the grammatical material will be made as soon as we compile additional graded reading material to supplement that in the text. Then the working over of the grammatical material for the first time may be extended over a quarter and a half or two quarters. In the second quarter Greenfield's "Chemical German" (Heath & Co., New York) was used and read in the same way with either topical review of grammar or a t least a continuous reference to grammatical constructions illustrated in the reading material. In the second half of this quarter assignments in outside reading from Ostwald's* "Die Schule der Chemie" (Viewegund Sohn, Braunschweig) weregiven, on the average three to six pages a week. Translation, drill in vocabulary and idioms, etymology, word formation, and the study especially of prefixes and suffixes, madeup the work of the class. Only apart of the hour was devoted to translation; easy passages, except in the beginning of the course, were hardly ever taken up for translation. A good many times the student was asked merely to give the thought of a certain sentence or passage. The idea which the language conveyed was constantly stressed rather than the mere transla'Since the purchase of the Ostwald, a bwk of some 450 pages, would entail a rather too heavy expense on the student, the School of Chemistry Library ordered some 15 copies to he kept on reserve in the library for the use of the students. We hope to find a more suitable book for this purpose but so far the simple dialog form of this text has proved the mast suitable.
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tion. Complicated sentences, however, were always analyzed and translated, or a t times paraphrased. The ideal of the ultimate attainment of the thought in the language without translating was constantly kept before the studentwith the encouragement to try this first with the simple sentences and then with the more complicated. In the third quarter the reading material both in class and outside was gradually increased. In addition to the completion of Greenfield mentioned above, Lassar-Cohn, "Die Chemie im Taglichen Leben" (Heath&Co., New York) was read. For the outside reading Ostwald was continued and during the last half of the quarter, articles from current chemical journals were assigned and reported on. The students were given a list of some thirty German chemical periodicals found in the library of the school of chemistry. From this list the following journals were most frequently used for the reports: Brennstoff Chemie, Chemiker Zeitz~ng, Chemische Industrie, Journal fur Praktische Chemie, Papier Fabrikant, Zeitschrift fur Farbenindustrie, Zeitschrift fur angewandte Chemie, and Die chemische Fabrik. The report, as in the case of the Ostwald, was a short written synopsis or abstract of an article of from 1000 to 2000 words in length. This proved, on the whole, a very successful move, because it gave the student an insight into the actual practical value of his study, many students becoming much more interested in the subject because of the matter to be gleaned from such an article. Throughout the whole year's course weekly written quizzes were given consisting of translations, paraphrasing, grammatical, and vocabulary drill, etc. During the first year in which the one-year course was tried out, the class of students taking the old two-year course were also finishing up. This gave us an opportunity to compare the results of this one-year course with what had been accomplished with the two-year course. At the end of the third quarter the same test, consisting almost entirely of sight translation, was given to both classes. A comparison of the results in the two classes showed almost no diierence in reading ability between the two classes among the upper third or fourth of the class, i . e., in the A and B grade students. In the middle and lower registers the students with the two years made a somewhat better record. In making this comparison, it must be kept in mind that both classes had had one year of chemical German, the two-year course having, however, the advantage of a year's literary German plus a greater amount of time spent on grammar. Even so, it is suprising that the differencebetween the two classes was not considerably greater. One inference to be drawn from this is that reading chemical German is very different from reading the usual beginning German. This discrepancy in the two types of work has been further emphasized by our experience in 6ndiig students with fifteen quarter credits in the regular beginning literary German who transferred to the
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third quarter of the chemical German course unable to keep up with students who had had only one-half as many credits in German as they and, in a number of cases, actually failing to keep up with the work of the second quarter of the one-year course, whose members had had only four credits in German. Such a course as that outlined above may, without doubt, be considerably improved. We are, we hope, improving it every year and are open to further suggestions from the readers of this article on how to improve it. This year, for example, with a group of over two hundred students in this course, we shall be able to group the students according to ability and thus, for the first time, push one or two sections much faster than the others. This, we hope, will enable more students than ever to gain an actual working knowledge of the language. Except for the elimination of everything unessential to the study of expository chemical German prose, there is nothing particularly new in the pedagogy of the course. The writer, who for years has been and still is an advocate of the direct method of teaching the language, is interested here merely in recording as objectively as possible the results of an experiment more or less forced on the department. Pedagogically it follows to some extent the recommendations of the recent survey of the committee on the teaching of modern languages in this country in its emphasis on an increased amount of reading material. Because of lack of time there is no learning of an active vocabulary since all the time available must be spent on the acquisition of a passive or recognition vocabulary. My answer, therefore, to the question asked a t the beginning of this discussion, as to whether such a one-year course is worth while, is decidedly an affirmative one. In the first place the science student is often without such liking for the study of a foreign language because the material he takes up is on a subject matter in which he is not a t all interested. By beginning with the chemical prose this prejudice is a t once overcome. There are few students in this course who look upon the study as pure drudgery, a situation all too often encountered in the usual beginning language class. The students taking the course are sophomores and will have occasion in their junior and senior years to refer to German works and articles in connection with certain advanced courses in which, it is understood, their professors will require some reading of this nature. This will keep up the interest in the language and will give the better students, a t least, an opportunity t o develop the ability to read the language fluently and directly, i. e., without translating. When this stage has once been reached the language will become a permanent asset in the student's work. It is not claimed that the one-year course will give the aererage student a reading knowledge of the language in a stm: interpretation of that
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expression. F O ~ the purpose of further experiment it would be very desirable to continue the course along these lines for another year. I feel confident, however, that with two years of such work (or possibly somewhat less) the C grade student would be able to read with facility the average chemical Geman required in his field.
