ose sentences, in multiple variations, were repeated by literally thousands of foreign students who made their way through the U-M English Language Institute (ELI) as they expanded their English-speaking skills in the 1940s and ’50s. Now those phrases are as outmoded in teaching English as a second language as a World War II jet fighter, but when ELI was founded in 1941, those phrases were ammunition in the diplomatic wars of that era.
The fascist powers’ efforts to penetrate Latin America before World War II included teaching Italian and German. To promote Pan-American cooperation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formulated the Good Neighbor Policy, aimed at countering the influence of totalitarianism in Latin America. The policy included English instruction in the predominantly Spanish-speaking countries as a part of cultural exchange programs. But that raised the question of how best to teach English as a foreign language.
The US State Department, with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, aided in setting up a conference at Michigan in 1939 to devise a method of teaching English; two years later it supported the establishment of the Institute under the directorship of Prof. Charles C. Fries of the Department of Linguistics.
"Fries’s influence on the ELI and on the teaching of English throughout the world was enormous," says H. Joan Morley, associate professor of linguistics and a member of the ELI faculty in the North University Building. "Until this Institute was founded, there was no oral methodology for teaching English. A fast method was desired, and Fries developed the Oral Approach, which presented grammatical forms and patterns as exercises that were listened to, repeated and varied in a series of drills."
But the original ELI method involved much more than military-like language drilling. In addition to a series of eight-week sessions held throughout the year, students were immersed in an English-language environment. During the ’40s and ’50s, staff members lived in the dormitories with the students, ate lunch and dinner with them, chatted with them in daily social periods and organized weekly Friday evening programs where students made formal presentations in English on a selected topic, then joined in an informal gathering of games, singing and dancing.
As the ELI grew in importance, its reach spread over the world. It was
offering non-U-M students intensive English training and a teacher education program so that they could go on to other universities where English was the language of instruction or go back to their home countries to become English teachers, scholars, government officials or businessmen. It developed a series of textbooks on teaching English that sold over a million copies all over the world.
ELI has always conducted research into language learning and teaching, and constructed and administrated a worldwide testing and certification service with 150 examiners in 110 countries testing the level of English proficiency.
The ELI’s success inspired other US universities to launch competing centers, often with ELI alumni at the helm. By the 1970s, however, some members of the linguistics community felt that the audio-lingual method, with its emphasis on drills, had the appearance of behavioral psychology, with a stimulus/response basis that was too simplistic.
One result of the ELI’s farflung influence, however, was that by the mid ’80s there was no longer anything distinctive about it. So when John Swales took over as director in 1985, he decided it was time for bold renovation.
"The ELI was marginalized in the University," Swales says. "We were not making as much money as in the ’70s, schools in coastal areas were able to attract the new immigrants, and a number of foreign governments that had been sponsoring ELI students were able to cut deals with other universities and get their students admitted elsewhere." Michigan, on the other hand, did not guarantee admission to successful ELI students and, also unlike some of its new competitors, ELI classes did not count as credit toward a degree.
The number of students fell from 200 - 250 a semester to 80 - 100. Peter Steiner, the dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the time, asked why the Institute identified only students outside the University as its clients when U-M’s 2,000 international students also needed help with their English skills. Steiner’s question was the catalyst ELI needed. "We turned ourselves into an operation that primarily serves the University of Michigan," Swales says. With the exception of a small number of students in the summer who are not U-M students, ELI clients are now exclusively from the U-M, and the Institute once again has become specialized.
Now that its central mission is to assist non-native speaking students acquire the sophisticated level of English necessary for successful participation in the academic community, the courses are on such subjects as academic writing; research papers and thesis writing; term paper writing; dissertation prospectus and dissertation writing; discussion and oral argumentation; and speaking in research contexts. About a fourth of U-M’s 3,300 international students are taking ELI courses in any given semester, Swales estimated.
There is an advanced intensive summer program for business and management students, and Swales recently decided to offer a course in English for legal studies, another first for ELI, he believes.
"Our biggest lack for graduate students at the moment is an advanced course in critical reading," he says. "We should be teaching professional reading—that is, if you received this manuscript, would you accept it?"
The ELI has remade itself again; its emphasis today is not overtly or covertly political, but almost wholly linguistic and academic. "We focus on the language needed by students to accomplish the tasks they must do," Morley puts it. "We are a leader again."
. . . October 1995
ose sentences, in multiple variations, were repeated by literally thousands of foreign students who made their way through the U-M