Reading in Modern Language Study

It is with extreme diffidence that I offer to read a paper before this Association. My own teaching is done under conditions of such disadvantage—with students so poorly prepared, and with results so unsatisfactory—that I cannot but feel how presumptuous it would be in me to attempt here to teach those who themselves teach under so much happier conditions and to so much better purpose than I can do. My sole apology might be an experience which, covering now three decades of language teaching, has passed through many phases both of our professional activity at large and of my own individual work. But these phases, for myself personally, have been rather renewals of effort and of disappointment than landmarks of progress or of triumph; and this experience, if I could recount it, might serve rather as a warning than as an example. So that it is as a seeker rather than as a giver that I come, to share my counsel with my more favored brethren; in order that by the confession of my own shortcomings, and especially by the criticism and discussion which this paper may elicit, I may be helped —and so perchance may help others—to find “the better way.”