I may as well begin by confessing that I make this report somewhat selfconsciously. For one thing, I am pensively aware that it is my last report to you as Director of the Foreign Language Program. But in addition I seem to have acquired some notoriety as a scolder of language teachers, and it's a nice question whether I should stay in character or make my valedictory a flattering if slightly insincere performance. Some of my good friends have warned me that language teachers, like professional educators, are unusually sensitive to criticism, and they have advised that, while honesty is supposed to be the best policy, I need not be too generous with it. Beyond this wellmeant counsel my own natural impulses are to close four years of work for the advancement of language study in America by having all foreign language teachers as my friends. I put only one thing ahead of such advice and such impulses, and that is the good of the cause for which I shall continue to work until next summer, and on which it is now my duty to report candidly.

For the last ten years, the elementary courses (first two semesters) in foreign languages at the University of Texas have comprised five contact hours per week. They carry four semester hours credit in accordance with the well-known formula, 1 hour/week: 1 semester hour credit; 2 laboratory hours/week: 1 semester hour credit. Coincidentally, beginning in 1946, drill sessions were provided, in French and Spanish, for oral-aural practice outside of class. The oral-aural emphasis became then the established procedure. When, in 1952, the three departments of foreign languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic) moved into their new building, Batts Hall, the new facilities made possible further development.

German schools are gradually outgrowing the stage of chaos into which they had been plunged by the war. In a great effort the worst difficulties of the post-war period have been overcome, but conditions cannot yet be called normal. Classes still comprise 40 pupils and more. Although many schools have been rebuilt or newly built since the war, the bigger towns, which were nearly all heavily bombed, are still so short of accommodation that most school buildings have to be used in double shifts, i.e., two schools share one building, one school going in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The teaching load of a high school teacher is 25 periods (of 45 minutes each) a week. But in some respects peacetime conditions are gradually returning. Thus, the production of textbooks is approaching a satisfactory stage. There are two or three dozen different English courses for schools on the market, and a very large number of English and American texts in school-editions (with annotations). A catalogue published in the summer of 1955 enumerates 532 such editions printed in the Federal Republic of Germany, and there is nothing to prevent German schools from buying reading materials from Britain or the United States. A number of the German Länder have introduced a system by which all schoolbooks are provided free of charge.