The Principles of Language-Study

CHAPTER II
OUR STUDIAL CAPACITIES AND HOW TO USE THEM

In the first place, let us note carefully that we have so far dealt with no other form of language than the normal spoken colloquial, that form which is used under normal conditions by the average educated native. We have not been considering any written form of language whatever, either colloquial or classical, nor have we given any attention to the more classical or literary form of speech whether spoken or written. We have, indeed, alluded to these aspects or varieties of language, but merely in order to state that they are beyond the range of any truly spontaneous capacities. Reading and writing are not spontaneous processes; they are even unnatural processes if we do not already possess the spoken form. Learning how to use classical or artificialized forms of language such as poetry or rhetoric is a more or less studial process, an unnatural process if we do not already possess the normal colloquial. For this, then, if not for other reasons, we must be prepared to adopt certain forms of work unknown to man in his natural state (as exemplified by the very young child); we shall allude to these as the ‘studial methods.’

What, then, are these studial methods? Roughly speaking, we may say that they comprise all those forms of work which require on the part of the student conscious efforts of attention; work in which he must think, reflect, or calculate; work necessitating the exercise of his reasoning powers, work which cannot be performed automatically; this constitutes conscious work, and all methods embodying conscious work become ipso facto studial methods.

Most work of analysis and synthesis is of this order; all that we do to break up a sentence into words, into syllables, into sounds; all that we do to piece together sounds, syllables, and words in order to form sentences is of this order. Whenever we are distinctly conscious of the words and constructions we are using, we are doing something unknown to nature. Whenever we come to understand a sentence by analysing it, or to utter a sentence by piecing together as we go on, we are working by processes of the studial order; they were not used when we were learning our mother-tongue.

All those forms of work which we may include under the heading of ‘conversion’ are studial, and these are many and varied. Dictation consists in causing the pupil to convert the spoken into the written aspect of language, reading consists in causing him to do the reverse, most forms of translating consist in causing him to convert something from one language into another. We may also at times require our pupils to convert an affirmative sentence into a negative or an interrogative one, to convert a present tense into a past, a singular into a plural, passive into active, to convert a certain word-order into another.

All these things are of the studial order; sound they may be, necessary or essential they may be, but they are not spontaneous forms of work, for we have not by their aid learnt to use the spoken colloquial form of our mother-tongue.

All methods which necessitate the use of the eye are studial methods; nature never meant us to learn spoken language by eye. We may therefore designate as studial all forms of reading, reading aloud or mental reading, reading from traditional orthographies or phonetic transcriptions, reading of isolated sounds or of connected passages. More especially of the studial order are those curious and complicated practices (common, alas! to so many students) of ‘reading what we hear’ or ‘writing what we speak.’ In the former case, we hear a sentence, we reduce it mentally to written characters, and read mentally what we see in our imagination; in the other case we write in our imagination what we wish to say, and read aloud what we are writing.

It follows that all methods which require us to use the hand are studial methods; nature knows no more of spellings and handwriting than she does of shorthand, typewriting, and type-setting; all these things are of comparatively recent origin, and all of them have been deliberately invented by man.

All methods which teach meanings by means of etymology are of the studial order; nature intended that each word should become attached to that for which it stands and not become associated with its ancestral etymon or modern cognates. The dictum of nature is that a word means what all speakers of the same language (or variety of language) mean it to mean.

Thus it would appear that nearly everything that the average person actually does when learning a foreign language comes under the heading of the studial processes. He learns rules in order to become proficient in analysis and synthesis; for the same purpose, he memorizes the exceptions to the rules. He becomes (or hopes to become) an expert in pulling words to pieces and in reconstructing them from roots and affixes, in sentence-making and sentence-breaking. He learns chiefly by eye, and expresses himself chiefly by the pen-grasping hand. Indeed, he becomes so proficient in converting the spoken into the written form that he cannot understand or retain the foreign words or sentences he learns until he has converted them into an imaginary written form which, in his imagination, he reads off word by word. Similarly, he finds himself only able to express himself by dint of reading aloud the sentences which he is constructing bit by bit by a complicated process of ‘mental writing.’ He aims at becoming (and often does become) expert in converting one language into another by a process (unknown to nature) called translating. His accuracy is gained by rapid conversions of words from one inflected form to another: nominatives into accusatives, singulars into plurals, infinitives into participles. He attaches great importance to etymology, and the time he might spend in associating words with their meanings is often devoted to working out the family tree of foreign words. He spends little time in finding out what meanings the natives attach to their words and forms, but much time in identifying the units of etymology and in tracing them from one language to another.

This does not necessarily imply that the student is always doing the wrong thing, nor that his methods are always bad ones; we merely observe that he uses (or is taught to use) all manner of studial methods at the expense of spontaneous ones, and that, in so doing, he develops his studial capacities of language-study at the expense of his spontaneous ones. The question whether the studial methods should be used at all and, if so, which should be used, forms the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER III
WHY WE MUST USE OUR STUDIAL CAPACITIES

To learn, however, the written form of a language before having learnt how to assimilate the spoken form is unnatural and contrary to all our linguistic instincts; it is comparable to learning to cycle before having learnt to walk. At a certain stage, therefore, the learner will be taught how to recognize by eye what he has already assimilated by ear, and how to express with the pen what he has hitherto expressed by means of articulate sounds. In each case the process will be one of conversion, converting written characters into sounds or converting sounds into written characters. In both cases there will be articulation of some sort, for mental reading means mental articulation, and when we write we only write what we are repeating to ourselves mentally.

Neither of these forms of conversion is necessarily difficult. The processes, without being spontaneous in the true sense of the term, present at times certain analogies to truly spontaneous processes in that they are apparently performed without effort. Much depends, however, on the system of script; if the alphabet of the foreign language is almost identical with an alphabet we have already learnt to use, the difficulty will be less than in the case of a totally strange alphabet or syllabary. Japanese script, which contains a strange mixture of Chinese characters used both ideographically and phonetically, together with two different systems of native phonetic writing, presents difficulties unknown to the European student of European languages.

The artificial element in writing is particularly evident when we consider that many if not most orthographic systems are in contradiction to the spoken form of the languages they claim to represent. English spelling is an excellent case in point; its divergences from the actual language are so numerous and so great that we may be said to possess two distinct languages, the spoken and the written. To learn and to apply the arbitrary laws and conventions which serve to bridge the gap between the two requires capacities of observation and reasoning of a special order, essentially studial. For that reason we must make use of conversion devices of various kinds: dictation, reading aloud, transcription (or transliteration), and spelling drill. Many so-called ‘difficulties of grammar’ prove to be mere difficulties of spelling; the French conjugation and what remains of French declension are largely matters of spelling, often as baffling to the native French speaker as to the non-French student.

There are other reasons why studial methods must be adopted in a complete language-course. There exist forms of speech other than the form which is used normally in everyday conversation. There exist artificialized non-colloquial dialects, such as poetry, the language of emotion and oratory, the language of ceremony, the liturgical, and similar classical or archaic varieties. As we have already seen, nature teaches us only those living forms which are used by the people of our environment; for the others we must have recourse to studial methods. The everyday colloquial form is something we learn at home or in the street; the higher or more æsthetic forms are taught us at school or at college; we have to study them. The art of literary composition, the art of selecting and assembling deliberately and consciously those words which express our thoughts and emotions in the clearest and most appropriate manner, differs widely and essentially from the art of colloquy as exercised in our daily life. In order to become proficient in literary composition, we must acquire habits of concentration, we must be able to analyse, we must become expert in synthesis, we must learn to discriminate, we must develop our intelligence. The young child cannot do these things, nor can the savage or the idiot.

There is another reason why we cannot leave everything to nature: most language-courses must necessarily be corrective courses. The teacher generally finds among his adult students a large number who have already acquired certain notions of the language; they may have spent one or more years working at school-French, school-English, or whatever the language may be; they may have spent some time in the country where it is spoken, or they may have studied privately. In most of these cases it is practically certain that the student will have formed bad linguistic habits; his pronunciation will be deplorable, his command of the inflected forms will be deficient, his syntax will be faulty, and his semantic system will be that of his native tongue. In other terms, he has acquired a pidgin form of the language, such as Anglo-French or Franco-English, unnatural dialects unknown to native speakers; he may have become accustomed to using this form of language, even to using it automatically. Nor is that all; not only is his language-material faulty (to say the least of it), but his manner of study will probably have impaired very seriously his capacities for any sound form of assimilation. He has not been trained to observe nor to imitate nor to construct sentences by analogy; he has so trained himself to hearing what he expects to hear and what he thinks he hears that he has no notion of what he actually does hear; in short, he has generally learnt wrong material in wrong ways.

The only suitable course for such a student would be a corrective course, a course which would aim at replacing his faulty material by sound material and at replacing his former methods of study by sound methods. One by one his unsound acquisitions must be replaced by sound ones; we must teach him a new language. Now this cannot be done by means of spontaneous methods alone; unconsciousness will not undo the work consciousness has done; the natural powers which enable us to assimilate normal speech will rarely, if ever, turn bad habits into good ones or convert pidgin-speech into normal speech. What has been done consciously must be undone consciously. The student must be shown specifically in what respects his speech differs from that used by natives, and he must deliberately set to work to correct it item by item; we must explain things to him; we must provide him with charts, diagrams, and exercises; we must put him through courses of drill-work, and all these things will require his careful and even concentrated attention. We must also teach him how to correct his faulty methods of assimilating; we must explain to him why they are faulty and convince him that, however natural and easy they may seem to him, they are only of utility to the learner of pidgin-speech. We must teach him how to utilize the sound processes (both spontaneous and studial); he will not like to do so, he will constantly tend to revert to the processes to which he has become accustomed; we must react and cause him to react against his vicious tendencies. After a time, if fortunate, we may succeed in eradicating most of the faulty matter and in initiating the right habits of assimilation. From that point onwards the course will not be a corrective one but a normal one.

Do these considerations apply only to one who has already studied the language faultily, to the user of pidgin-speech? Are we to take it that the raw beginner is exempt from unnatural or vicious habits? Unfortunately this is not the case: more often than not, the student (even the student unspoiled by previous defective work) will tend to let his first language influence his second. If he is English, he will tend to insinuate English sounds, English forms, and English thoughts into the new language, which will therefore tend to become pidginized. This tendency will be greater with some than with others; much depends on the attitude of the student towards the language he is about to learn; he may already have studied other foreign languages, and in doing so may have acquired the wrong attitude towards foreign languages in general. If he considers them as branches of study similar to mathematics, history, or geography; or if he considers them essentially as orthographic systems of which the phonetic form is an unimportant detail, he will already have become one for whom a corrective course is necessary. We shall have to remove his prejudices and to modify his point of view; a certain amount of preliminary work will have to be done in order that he may see languages as they really are, in order that he may see the nature of the task before him. This preliminary work will be of the studial order, but will be succeeded at the right moment by the more normal and more spontaneous methods. On the other hand, many students start with no preconceived ideas whatever; children, the less intelligent adults, and those who have been unspoiled by the traditional classical fallacies will slip easily and naturally into the right attitude. They will recognize the necessity for learning new sounds and combinations, for assimilating foreign material without at each instant comparing it with the material of the mother-tongue; for retaining by the auditory memory strings of words and sentences, for reproducing orally what they hear, and for forming the right semantic associations. Such students will be immune or nearly so from the vicious tendencies which so characterize the average language-learner; they will merely have to be put on their guard at certain critical moments; we shall at such moments observe certain reasonable precautions in order that bad habits may not be acquired.

A fourth reason why we must not neglect the studial methods may be mentioned here. Many set out not so much to acquire the capacity for using the language as to learn its structure and peculiarities, just as a mechanic may wish to become acquainted with a machine without having the intention of ever using it. Phoneticians, grammarians, and philologists must in the ordinary course of their work become familiar with the characteristic features of many languages or dialects. For this purpose it is by no means necessary that they should acquire the capacity for understanding, speaking, reading, or writing the languages which interest them.

In such cases the spontaneous methods would obviously be out of place; no call need be made or should be made on the students’ natural powers of language-assimilating. They would proceed by way of analysis and synthesis, and instead of retaining the actual language-material itself would retain merely the laws which govern the functioning of the language.

We might place in this category of students those whose subsequent intention is to teach the language to others. It may not be necessary for the language-learner to know much about the theory of phonetics, but the language-teacher must possess a considerable knowledge of phonetic theory both general and as applied to the particular language in which he is an instructor. The learner need know little about the sciences dealing with inflexions, sentence-construction, or meanings; but the teacher must know a good deal about these things in order that he may foresee the special difficulties which his pupils will encounter, and devise the necessary exercises to overcome them. The technical side of language will therefore be of importance to all who are or who intend to become teachers, and such knowledge, like any other technical knowledge, is acquired by methods unrelated to our spontaneous capacities for assimilating normal colloquial speech.

The four series of considerations set forth above are sufficient to show that it would be either unwise or impossible to proceed by the sole aid of nature or by the reconstitution of natural conditions. Language-study is such a complex thing, with so many aspects, and it requires to be looked at from so many points of view, that we must enlist all our capacities when striving to obtain the mastery we desire; we must not neglect our spontaneous powers, nor should we despise our intellectual powers; both are of service to us, both have their place in a well-conceived programme of study, each will to a certain extent balance the other and be complementary to it. An excess on either side may be prejudicial to the student, and one of the more important problems before the speech-psychologist is to determine in what circumstances and on what occasions each should be used. More will be said on this particular phase of the subject in Chapter XV (“The Multiple Line of Approach”).

CHAPTER IV
THE STUDENT AND HIS AIM

The first answer which suggests itself is: “The best method is that which adopts the best means to the required end,” and indeed this is perhaps the only concise answer which can be furnished off-hand. But the answer is not satisfactory; it is too general, and so true that it ranks as a truism; it is resented as being a facetious manner of shelving the question. The inquirer has every right to return to the charge and to put the supplementary question: “What is the method which adopts the best means to the required end?”

In the present book we shall endeavour to find the best answer or the best series of answers to this most legitimate question. In doing so we shall set forth, with as much precision as is consistent with the claims of conciseness, the conclusions arrived at by those who have specialized in the subject and have obtained positive evidence bearing on it.

Fundamental as the question appears, there is yet a previous question of which we must dispose before going further, for we cannot determine “what is the best method adopting the best means towards the required end” until we know more precisely what is the required end.

For there are many possible ends, and many categories of students, each with a particular aim before him.

Many desire a knowledge of the written language only; they wish to be able to read and write, not to understand the spoken language nor to speak. Some may limit their attainment to a capacity for reading the language; they wish to have direct access to technical or other books. Others conceivably may wish solely to become able to write letters in the language. Many are only concerned with spoken language; they wish to be able to speak and to understand what they hear. Some wish to possess an ‘understanding’ knowledge only, while others are content merely to make themselves understood.

The student may limit his requirements to a very superficial knowledge of some pidgin form of the language, and will be perfectly happy if he just succeeds in making himself understood by using some atrocious caricature of the language which he is supposed to be learning. Or he may be more ambitious and set out in earnest to become master of the living language just as it is spoken and written by the natives themselves. The phonetician will wish to attain absolute perfection in the pronunciation of the language; the etymologist will concentrate on the historical aspect; the philologist will not be happy unless he is comparing the structure with that of cognate languages; the grammarian will specialize in grammar, and the lexicologist or semantician will study the meanings.

The clerk or merchant will specialize in the commercial language and learn how to draw up bills of lading or to conduct business correspondence. The hotel-keeper or waiter will concentrate on hotel colloquial, as also will the tourist or tripper. The littérateur will aim straight at the literature and disdain any of the non-æsthetic aspects or branches. Every calling or profession will seek its own particular line, and for each there will be a particular aim.

Many students have as their sole aim the passing of a given examination. Whether they come to know the language or not is a matter of comparative indifference to them; their business is to obtain as many marks as possible with the least amount of effort, and what does not lead directly to this aim is not of interest. It is the duty of many or most teachers to coach or to cram their pupils in order that satisfactory examination results may be obtained; they cannot afford to do anything else, nor have they any desire to do so. If the examination includes questions on phonetic theory, the pupil will be crammed with phonetic theory; if it includes a test in conversation, the pupil will be crammed with conversational tags; if it requires the capacity of translating, the pupil will duly be coached in the art of translating; if it requires a knowledge of a given text or series of texts, these will be the subject of study. If the pupil or his teacher knows something of the particular examiner, special efforts will be made to please that particular examiner. But this has little or nothing to do with the serious study of languages.

Some people are professional translators or interpreters; it is their business to render a faithful account of a speech or a sentence uttered in another language or to interpret the thoughts of some foreign writer. This work requires very special qualifications and necessitates a very special study, so much so that those who are perfectly bilingual experience a great difficulty every time that they are called upon to render a faithful translation of any document or a faithful interpretation of any oral communication. The task of the translator is quite distinct from that of the ordinary student of language, and is to be dealt with as such. Generally speaking, however, the language-learner will have comparatively little to do with the profession of interpreter or translator, and even in the exceptional cases he will do well to leave this particular branch until he has attained a certain proficiency in using the foreign language independently of any other. We have already alluded to the special requirements of the technician; we have seen that some require a knowledge of the structure or of certain aspects of one or more languages.

Such people, having entirely different aims, require entirely different methods; they must be furnished with everything that will facilitate their work of analysis or synthesis, and we may omit from their programme everything which does not lead directly towards the limited and special end they have in view.

Yet another factor is present and must be considered before we can draw up any definite programme of study. Are we giving a three months’ course or a three years’ course? If we are to obtain concrete and definite results in a limited space of time, our course must necessarily be an intensive one; we shall have to make a generous use of studial methods; we shall not be able to afford anything like an adequate period of preparation; we shall be forced to take short cuts and we shall reluctantly be compelled to sacrifice a certain measure of soundness to the requirements of speed. If, however, at the end of the short course to which circumstances limit our student’s opportunity, he has a chance to continue his studies by himself or to reside in the country where the language is spoken, we may devote the whole of our time to preparatory work. We may give him an intensive course of ear-training, articulation, or fluency exercises, cause him to memorize a certain number of key-sentences, and drill him into good habits of language-study. If we adopted this plan we should be laying the foundations upon which the student would build later by his own initiative, but the drawback would be that the student would have made but small progress in the actual process of assimilating vocabulary; he would be well prepared, but would have little to show as a result of his two or three months’ work.

If, on the other hand, we know that we have a clear period of two or more years before us, our task will be much easier. Instead of proceeding at a breathless rate to produce immediate concrete results, we may go to work in a more leisurely and more natural way. We may sow, and be assured that the harvest will be reaped in due time; the natural powers of language-study work surely but not rapidly; nature takes her time but yields a generous interest. With a long period in front of us, we may afford adequate intervals for ‘incubation’; it will not be necessary for us to accelerate the normal process of assimilation, but merely to let it develop in a gradual but ever-increasing and cumulative ratio. At the end of, let us say, the first year, our student will easily outstrip those whose initial progress seemed more satisfactory.

Evidently it will not be possible to draw up a programme of study which will be suitable for all the diverse requirements we have set forth. Nor will it be possible for every teacher to consider the individual requirements of each one of his pupils. We cannot have a specially printed course, nor even a manuscript one, for every student; but in the case of private lessons or of self-instruction we may certainly give a large amount of consideration to individual needs. The bad pronouncer will concentrate on phonetic work, the bad speller on orthographic work, the bad listener on devices leading towards immediate comprehension; the clerk will work with texts of a commercial nature, the tourist will specialize on hotel colloquial, etc. No student will ever be expected to work with one book only; each will gradually acquire a miniature library, and this library need not be the same for everybody.

In the case of collective courses and class teaching, individual requirements will be less observed, but in drawing up the programme the teacher will aim at the average result desired by or considered desirable for the average member of the class. As we shall see later, it is quite feasible to design lessons suitable for a class containing pupils of different capacities; we can arrange that some shall take an active part while others are assimilating more or less passively.

We see, in short, that when starting a new course under new conditions the teacher must draw up a programme. This programme will be divided into so many periods or stages, and for each period certain forms of work will be specified, these being designed to lead in the most efficient way to whatever the aim may happen to be. Without such a programme the teacher will never know exactly where his class stands, the work will be too much of a hand-to-mouth nature, and there will be loose ends. This programme may of course be more or less experimental or tentative; it may be modified in accordance with the teacher’s experience and with the results he has so far obtained. The idea of a hard-and-fast programme does not commend itself; it should, on the contrary, be more or less elastic in order that it may be expanded or contracted according to circumstances. Anything in the nature of a ‘patent method’ (guaranteed to work within so many lessons) suggests quackery. Our programme should be something other than a rigid procedure based on any one particular principle, however logical that principle may seem to be. There are many logical principles, and we must strive to incorporate all of them into whatever programme we design. We shall treat of these in the next chapters.

CHAPTER V
THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF THE ELEMENTARY STAGE

It is during the first stage that we can secure habits of accuracy, that we can train the student to use his ears, that we can develop his capacities of natural and rapid assimilation, that we can foster his powers of observation. Good habits are easily formed (as also are bad habits); at the outset of his studies the learner, whoever he may be, educated or illiterate, child or adult, enjoys the advantage of a plastic mind; it can be shaped according to our will; we can train it to form good and sound habits of language-study. At no other period shall we find such plasticity. Difficult, almost impossible, is the task of undoing what has already been done, of removing faulty habits of perception and of replacing them by sound ones. The student who has passed through an unsound elementary course finds his road to progress barred; the twig has been badly bent, the foundations have been badly laid. All we can then do is to endeavour by means of a corrective course to undo the mischief which has been done, and a thankless task it is. No amount of advanced work can fully compensate or make good the harm which has been wrought by the untrained or unwise teacher. It is too late. Certain habits have been formed, and we all realize what it means to eradicate a bad habit and to replace it by a good one.

What are some of these bad habits? What are the most characteristic vicious tendencies which have been encouraged by an unsound elementary stage? Some of these are positive, others are negative. In some cases the student has acquired bad habits; in others he has neglected to acquire good ones; often the two kinds are complementary to each other. We find, for instance, that he has neglected to train his ears, he has not been shown what to observe nor how to observe. The consequence is that he is unaware of the existence of certain foreign sounds, and invariably replaces them by absurd or impossible imitations based on the sounds of his mother-tongue. Instead of French é he will use English ay; instead of French on he will use English ong; a trilled r will be replaced by an English fricative r or by no r at all.

Lack of ear-training will cause him to insert imaginary sounds where there are none. The French student will introduce an r (and a French r at that!) in words such as course or farm; he will insert a weak e [ə] in the pl of people or in the bl of able. He has never actually heard such sounds, but imagines that he has; his ears have not been trained to observe. He has formed the habit of replacing ear-impressions by eye-impressions; he believes what his eyes tell him, and his untrained ears cannot correct the tendency; he has become the dupe of unphonetic spellings.

The neglect of his powers of audition will cause him to rely absolutely on his powers of visualizing the written form. He will refuse to receive the language-matter by the auditory channel; he will declare with insistence that “he cannot learn a word or a sentence until he has seen it written”; he will even decline to learn a word except in its traditional (and probably phonetically inaccurate) orthographic form.

If the elementary course has not provided for the development and use of the powers of unconscious assimilation, the student will attempt the hopeless task of passing the whole of the language-material through his limited channel of consciousness. He will seek to concentrate his attention on every simple unit of which the foreign language is composed, and hope thereby to retain every one, a feat of memory which we know to be impossible. He will therefore have formed the habit of deliberately avoiding that natural process which alone will enable him to make effective progress.

He will also have formed the ‘isolating’ habit, which consists in learning the individual elements of a group instead of learning the group as it stands. He will learn chaise instead of la chaise, allé instead of suis allé or est allé. In other terms, he will have formed the habit of word-learning and have neglected that of word-group-learning. Hence, instead of having at his disposal a number of useful compounds such as Je ne le lui ai pas donné, Il n’y en a pas de ce côté-ci, or À cette époque-ci, he will endeavour laboriously and generally unsuccessfully to build up by some synthetic process (probably that of literal translation) every word-group, phrase, or sentence in the language.

Had his elementary course included the systematic memorizing of word-groups, this would have become a habit; as it is, he has acquired the habit of not doing so.

Bad semantic habits may also have been formed. That is to say, the student may have trained himself (or even may have been trained) to consider that each foreign word corresponds precisely to some word in his own language. For him prendre is the exact equivalent of to take; to get is an untranslatable word, and many foreign words are meaningless!

If translation (not in itself a bad habit) has been carried to extremes, and if the habit of direct association has been neglected, the student will have formed the habit of translating mentally everything that he hears or reads, and this will be fatal to subsequent progress.

The principle of gradation may have been faultily applied in different ways. The teacher may have considered it his duty to over-articulate his words, to pause before each word, and to speak under the normal speed of five syllables per second. In this case the student will have formed the habit of understanding no form of speech other than this artificialized type. The capacity for understanding normal, rapid, and even under-articulated speech can only be developed by exercise in listening to such speech, and he will not have had this exercise.

The elementary programme may also have been drawn up in such a way as to preclude the study of irregular forms. If this has been the case, the student, unprepared for irregularities, will not know how to deal with them, and his rate of progress will be correspondingly diminished when they occur in more advanced work.

These are some of the bad habits, positive and negative, which will result from an unsound elementary course; these will be some of the fruits of early lessons which have not been based on the essential principles of language-teaching.

One of the functions of an elementary course is to enable the student to make use, even if only in a rudimentary way, of the language he is learning. It is therefore maintained by some that any form whatever of teaching which leads to such result may be considered as satisfactory. On these grounds it might be urged that, as pidgin-speech is better than no speech at all, we should at the outset aim at pidgin, and leave it to the more advanced stage to convert this type of speech into the normal variety as used by the natives.

But those who may hold this view forget that the elementary course has a second and more important function, viz. so to prepare the student that his subsequent rate of progress shall constantly increase.

The quantity of matter contained in even the everyday language is great—greater than most of us generally imagine. Not only are there thousands of words, but the majority of these consist of a group of allied forms, declensional, conjugational, and derivative. Very many words also stand for two, three, or more different meanings; moreover, the meaning of any word is influenced by the presence of other words in the same sentence. Were the beginner able to see in advance the full extent of the work that lies before him, he might abandon his task at the outset.

The work of assimilating this enormous mass of language-stuff will certainly never be accomplished on retail lines; it will not be done by mere efforts of analysis, synthesis, and eye-work. Unless the rate of progress increases continuously, unless the principle of gradation is observed strictly, there is no prospect of the student gaining that mastery of the language which is his aim.

It is the elementary stage, long or short, which will prepare the student for this increasing rate of progress, and an elementary course which has not so prepared the student cannot be said to have accomplished its purpose. It is during the elementary stage that we turn out the good or the bad worker. The function of the first lessons is not only to teach the language, but, more important still, to teach the student how to learn.

When we have instilled into him the habits of correct observation, of using his ears, of using his capacities for unconscious assimilation, of forming direct associations—in short, when we have taught him how to learn—the subsequent stages may safely be left to the student and to nature. Let us take care of the elementary stage, and the advanced stage will take care of itself.

CHAPTER VI
THE PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE-TEACHING

The art of method-writing (or of course-designing, which is not very different) is in its infancy; it has all the marks of the early or even primitive stage; it is in a state of slow evolution comparable to that which characterized the gradual perfecting of mechanical inventions and devices such as the typewriter, the bicycle, or the calculating machine. In the early stages of each of these (and many similar things) each model was more or less rudimentary and clumsy. A dozen different inventors working individually produced a dozen different machines; although all designed to accomplish the same work, the means adopted in each case differed fundamentally. In 1890 it was possible to distinguish even at a distance the make of any particular bicycle. At the present day we can still see great differences of structure between the different makes of typewriters and calculating machines. As time goes on, however, we notice a gradual convergence of types; one inventor profits by the work of others; in spite of the laws of patent, certain improvements are copied or adapted, individual defects are gradually eliminated and devices or dispositions which have proved their worth are adopted. The tendency is always towards the more perfect type, the more efficient apparatus; and the path towards perfection is marked by an ever-growing convergence of types. The ideal appears to be reached when there is practically no scope for further improvements; by that time the theoretical principles have been worked out and have become common property; what divergences do continue to exist are not concerned with essentials, they are merely variations of equal value. Were we to ask a hundred different bicycle-makers or boat-builders to design what they considered an ideal model, the hundred resultant models would be for all practical purposes identical.

Now, if we asked a hundred different language-teachers to design what each considered an ideal course or text-book, the result at the present day would certainly be a hundred different courses. They would differ in every conceivable way; most of them would differ from the others fundamentally. This would prove that the art in question is in a very early stage; it would prove that few or no fundamental principles are generally recognized. If, however, at some date in the distant future we were to make the same request, restricting our invitation to those who will have made a special study of the subject, to those who will have been striving towards perfection, we should probably find no great degree of diversity in the treatment; we should see the converging tendency at work, and should gather that the fundamental principles were beginning to stand out and to be respected. In the yet more distant future the answer to our request might take the form of a hundred manuscripts, all essentially the same, and differing only in non-essential details; we should then know that the fundamental principles had been established and had been accepted, but by that time none but experts in the subject will ever venture to carry out such highly technical work.

Much time will probably elapse before we arrive at this desirable state of things; much error will have to be eliminated and much experimental work will have to be accomplished. We shall have to ascertain exactly what does take place when we learn, and exactly what are the mental processes involved. We shall then have to grope about and feel our way, adopting and rejecting, modifying and adapting, improving and perfecting. We shall have to co-ordinate our efforts so that each may profit by the success or failure of fellow-workers; we shall have to experiment under all sorts of conditions, with all sorts of learners, and with all sorts of languages. There are distinct signs to-day that this kind of co-operation is coming about. We see, for instance, that the branch of language-study concerned with pronunciation is already far advanced in the experimental stage. For years past phoneticians have been busily engaged in research work; at first working apart, they are now coming together and pooling their efforts, each profiting by the discoveries of the others. A universal terminology is coming into existence; a universal phonetic alphabet is well on its way; the principles of phonetics and of phonetic transcription are developing rapidly, and the inevitable experts’ quarrels are becoming more and more confined to matters of detail and to non-essentials. The remarkable advance in this comparatively new science is one of the most hopeful signs of progress, and a pledge of eventual perfection.

A similar advance in the sister sciences such as grammar and semantics is not yet apparent, but there are signs that ere long the many isolated workers in these domains will be able to do what the phoneticians did twenty or thirty years ago; they will enlist new workers, they will open up the field of research, they will draw up, first tentatively and then decisively, the broad principles on which the experimental and constructive work will repose, there will be co-ordinated and co-operative effort in many countries, and we shall witness the coming into existence of the general science of linguistics.

In the meantime, the subject is engaging the attention of psychologists. Strangely enough, the psychologists, whose function it is to ascertain how we learn, have not been consulted by writers of language-courses, and few of them have ever intervened in the matter. Each language-teacher has had to feel his way as best he could, proceeding empirically, dabbling in psychology, which meant that he did not always apply and often misinterpreted whatever principles of the subject he may have picked up. There are signs that speech-psychologists are about to co-ordinate their efforts with those of the phoneticians and with the experience of those who are actively engaged in making their language-teaching more efficient. We can point to more than one centre both in England and abroad where this co-operation is in its initial stage, and once this co-operation becomes an accomplished fact progress will be very rapid, and the progress will be sound. The work of Sweet, of Jespersen, and of de Saussure (to cite only three of our modern leaders) has already paved the way for the new and growing contingent of workers who are prepared to take up the threads and to weave them together in the fabric of the future.

What are the principles of language-study so far evolved? What are the fundamental axioms so far postulated? Do they give us the impression of soundness? Do they appear to us to be reasonable? Do they bear the aspect of finality? We shall judge. We shall endeavour to formulate the leading principles which have resulted from long periods of experimental work so far carried on by individual workers. The list will probably not be exhaustive, nor will the items be presented in that perfectly logical sequence which the future reserves for it. It will, however, seek to embody the largest number of important precepts under the smallest number of headings, in order that we may see in a concise form something which is still evolving and progressing towards further efficiency and simplicity. We purposely omit from the list certain minor principles and modes of application, nor can particular details connected with the study of particular languages be well included in the present work.

At the present day nine essential principles seem to stand out fairly clearly, and may provisionally be named as follows: