The great illusionBorn and educated in France, for a long time I thought people learned foreign languages to understand others from different cultures so that world wars would be prevented from ever happening again.Indeed, when the field of Applied Linguistics was born in 1964, many European linguists and language educators still had vivid memories of the two world wars of the twentieth century that had spread so much hatred and death around the world.We believed that learning each other's language would act as a deterrence to war.After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, this belief made the teaching of languages more urgent than ever.If the peoples of the planet traded with one another, we thought, at least they would have to talk and negotiate -rather than obliterate -each another.By translating their grammars into our vocabularies and "displaying the logic of their ways of putting things in the locutions of ours" (Geertz, 1983, p. 10), we would understand how they think.In turn, understanding them would make us better understand our own language and the way we speak, think, and act.When, in 1943 in France, I had to choose a first foreign language in school, the only options were English and German.As my mother was English, my French father said: "Since you have English at home, take German!" German was, at the time, the most controversial foreign language I could learn, and for many years I was the only student of German at my school.Later, as a French woman, I became fascinated by German literature and history because I wanted to understand the Germans, who had been fighting my countrymen for over four generations.But the philological grammar translation method gave me access to German texts, not to German speakers.Moving to the United States (U.S.
Claire Kramsch (Mon,) studied this question.