Teaming Teachers and Modifying Class Size: An Experiment in First-Year French*

THREE MAJOR CONCERNS for foreign language educators today are teaching load, class size, and the preparation of future teachers. Over the past three years, our profession has welcomed a steady increase in enrollment.' Yet as Verzasconi laments, our good fortune in enfrollment has often resulted in heavier teaching loads and increased class sizes-pragmatic, yet unsatisfactory solutions to having more students and reduced budgets.2 Helt rightly points out that this solution is particularly unproductive for programs whose goal is communicative competence.3 Already severe in secondary schools and small colleges where faculty teach all courses, the problem of more students per instructor is often compounded at larger institutions, where lower-level courses are relegated to teaching assistants (TAs), many of whom are new to the profession and without preparation in teaching methodology. Concern for TA training is, in fact, developing again.4 In the wake of the Holmes and Carnegie Reports that propose more rigorous training programs for elementary and secondary teachers, colleges and universities will surely be focusing renewed attention on their TA training programs and will find their problems compounded by their very healthy enrollments.5 There is no doubt that many institutions are responding creatively to the dilemma of more students and a smaller, perhaps inexperienced teaching staff. For example, Ludwig reports experimenting with longer, less frequent classes to find no apparent difference in either the amount students study or the grades they receive.' The much-publicized Dartmouth-Rassias model divides instruction between a master teacher, who introduces and teaches grammar, and undergraduate apprentice teachers, who lead drills, games, and conversational activities.7 This article reports on another restructuring of the typical five-day, singleinstructor model of teaching, used rather successfully in first- and secondsemester French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison between 1981 and 1983. Although the restructuring is not currently in use, since it did not prove to be financially beneficial at Wisconsin, the experiment did show interesting advantages for students, faculty, and, especially, for the training of teaching assistants. Today, as concern for teaching load, class size, and TA training continues to grow, this team-taught model may merit further consideration.