A Different Look at Language.

During the 1960s, students at all levels not only studied newly offered subjects, they also found many familiar disciplines taught in such a different way as to be almost unrecognizable. The National Defense Education Act, which had been extended from its original 1958 version, had introduced foreign-language education into hundreds of schools that had not previously offered it. By 1966 more than three thousand undergraduates were getting intensive training in thirty-six languages during summer programs at more than twenty-two institutions through provisions in that act. Many of these students were later employed in secondary schools, so that more high-school students than ever had a chance to learn a second language. For elementary and secondary students studying their native language, some dramatic changes were in store. Advances in the study of English by linguists Paul Postal and Noam Chomsky at MIT...