Ten years ago the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures began searching for new teaching strategies to supplant the traditional regimen of grammar drills and textbook exercises.

Under a new language coordinator, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Wilga M. Rivers, the department began a curriculum overhaul that brought new courses, technology, and methods of instruction. Since these changes began in 1974, enrollment in language courses has jumped 66 percent, Rivers says.

"We're developing the types of courses to suit the needs of Harvard students," Rivers explains, adding that because 70 percent of Harvard students come to the college with a solid knowledge of a language, the program incorporates a "great deal of work at the advanced levels."

The primary target of the intermediate and upper level courses is to give students a practical command of the language, according to Rivers. For example, the recently created Spanish Cd, "Spanish Oral Survival Course," was designed so that "if a student were helicoptered into Spain tomorrow, he or she could communicate," Rivers explained.

Responding to a perceived demand from students who plan to work abroad, the department has begun a series of "language for business" courses, the latest of which, "Spanish for Business," will start next year.

The French version of the course, introduced in the spring of 1982, goes beyond the basic vocabulary for working in a Francophone country. Students learn specific French business practices, like labor relations, and are prepared to take the French Chamber of Commerce exam, according to Senior Preceptor Judith G. Frommer, who teaches the course.

The department also offers "Portugese for Business," which Assistant Professor Naomi Hoki Moniz says is particularly relevant after Portugal's recent entry into the European Common Market.

Other practical courses added under the curriculum-development program include "Reading Italian," begun two years ago, and "Spanish for the Bilingual," for students looking to perfect their native language.

These practically oriented classes have expanded the department's curriculum, but greater use of modern technology--once limited to weekly treks to the language lab--now has become the foundation of both new and old classes.

An advanced Spanish class, for example, spends an entire semester watching Latin American soap operas via satellite in order to study the dialects and cultural idiosyncracies of Hispanic society, Rivers says.

Beginning in 1979 French F and French G students have written and filmed video programs imitating television's "Eyewitness News," shows which Senior Preceptor Anne Slack says "have to be humorous and far-fetched, or else we'd get terribly bored."

In recreating an entire program--news, weather, editorials and commercials--Slack says her students "have to learn body movements and gestures that are as authentically French as possible," since students at this level "usually have very good pronunciation and need only work on the little details you see at the advanced level."

With the videotapes, "they can see themselves as French as they can be and see their mistakes themselves," she adds.

Moniz says Portuguese students have recently used tapes from Brazilian television, to observe regional dialects and interaction between social classes, and they have also written and taped theater plays.

For instructors in the Italian section, extensive use of videotapes will have to wait a couple of years, because manufacturers are "just now beginning to see good material on the market," explains Luigi Burzio, an assistant professor in the department.