The curricula of foreign language courses in secondary education in this country has, until the present decade, been centered largely about the traditional philosophy which contends that skills and knowledge of the "grammar" of the language should be the principal outcomes of the study. In recent years the emphasis has shifted to fluency in conversation, but the teaching methods being utilized in the realization of this new objective have not proven themselves entirely satisfactory. The Army Specialized Training Program in Foreign Languages, which was begun in 1943, has been surprisingly successful in teaching conversational fluency. This new method is centered about extensive utilization of audio-visual techniques and devices; hence, these aids are gaining new emphasis in present-day instruction.
