LANGUAGE STUDY

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30234, 12 September 1963, Page 7

LANGUAGE STUDY

Courses For Executives (Special Crspdt. N.ZP.A.) LONDON, Sept. 10. Britain’s Institute of Directors is to open in November a “languages laboratory” where businessmen will be. able to learn colloquial I French, German, Italian and! Spanish. Later, Russian andj Portuguese will be added if there is sufficient demand, j A preliminary inquiry among the institute’s 500 i members has shown five out! of six are interested in the idea. Electronic equipment will be used for the courses which will vary in length from six weeks to five days and range in price from 100 guineas to '■ 20 guineas. The “laboratory” method of ■ teaching languages is expenI sive and is used extensively in America and by American overseas forces. Each pupil has a cubicle and a tape recording machine for some lessons. He also attends classes with a teacher in the ordinary way. Sir Richard Powell, direc-tor-general of the institute, said: “The directors want to speak foreign languages col-| loquially and with the right! accent, but they don’t want, neither have they the time, to retrace the dreary grammatical paths they followed at school. For them, the language laboratory is the answer. “It has been proved time and time again that men and women with no knowledge of a foreign language can carry on an everyday conversation in that language after only three weeks’ training by these new methods,” he said.