Defense Language Institute

The products of military research and development activities are often found, years later, in the civilian environment. The Internet is perhaps the most famous of the many devices invented by the military for its own purposes that are now used widely in civilian life. Jonas Salk developed influenza vaccines while serving in the military. Other examples include the biodegradable detergents and fire-retardant fabrics found in many households today. This entry reviews the history of the Defense Language Institute (DLI), another military enterprise with effects on civilian life, including bilingual education and other types of language teaching. The DLI is well known for its introduction and refinement of the audio-lingual method of language teaching, first for teaching languages to soldiers, and subsequently to children and youth in schools across the nation in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

A forerunner of the DLI was a secret school to teach the Japanese language established by the U.S. Army in 1941, before U.S. involvement in World War II. Classes in the secret school began with 4 teachers and 60 students in an abandoned airplane hangar at Crissy Field in San Francisco. The students were mostly second-generation Japanese Americans from the West Coast. During the war, the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS), as it came to be called, grew dramatically. West Coast Japanese Americans were moved to internment camps in 1942, and the school moved to temporary quarters at Camp Savage, Minnesota. When the school outgrew these quarters, it moved to Fort Snelling, Minnesota.

In 1946, the school moved to the Presidio of Monterey in California. There, it was renamed the Army Language School, which expanded in 1947 and 1948 to meet cold war language training requirements. Russian became the largest language program, followed by Chinese, Korean, and German. After the Korean War (1950–1953), the Army Language School became a pacesetter with the audio-lingual method and the application of educational technology such as the language laboratory.

The National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA) paved the way for the Army Language School's audio-lingual method to transition to the civilian sector, by providing funding to support language teacher training. The NDEA aimed at strengthening the national defense through educational improvement efforts in science, communications technology (e.g., audio, video, television), vocational education, and foreign languages. Summer language institutes were organized under contract with institutions of higher education. The institutes included demonstration classes with junior high and senior high school students, where teachers and learners could practice new methods.

The institutes' curricula allowed students to make measurable improvement in essential criteria for effective language teaching in the audio-lingual method's structural linguistic approach—listening, speaking, reading, writing, and conducting linguistic analysis—as well as expanding participants' knowledge of the [Page 218]culture of the people who speak the language natively. Institutes were also expected to instruct in the use of modern classroom methodologies and in the use of new instructional materials and mechanical and electronic devices intended to assist in developing pupils' language skills. Institute students observed demonstrations of best practices and were provided with frequent opportunities for guided classroom experience with new methods and materials.

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