Before examining and reviewing the principles of language-study, it will be well for us to note one important point. The reader ere long may protest that we pay no attention to anything except beginner’s work, that we examine no evidence bearing on the more advanced stages, that we give no advice nor offer any suggestions concerning the work of the second and subsequent years. “We are not interested in elementary work,” some may say; “what we require is a series of counsels as to how to conduct the subsequent (and more difficult) work.”

And yet we shall have little to say concerning the more advanced course; on the contrary, we shall constantly lay stress and insist on the supreme importance of the elementary stage.

It is the first lessons that count; it is the early lessons which are going to determine the eventual success or failure of the course. As the bending of the twig determines the form of the tree, as on the foundations depends the stability of the building, so also will the elementary training of the student determine his subsequent success or failure.

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 [?] 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.