In the first chapter we have seen that each of us, child or adult, possesses in either an active or a latent state certain capacities for the spontaneous assimilation of the spoken and colloquial form of any given language, native or foreign. In the case of the young child, these capacities are in an active state and at his immediate service, he does not require to be trained in their use; in the case of the average adult, these capacities are in a latent state, they have fallen into disuse, they are not at his immediate service, he must train himself to use them, he must learn how to learn.

In the first place, he must realize that language-learning (within the scope of our definition) is an art and not a science; to become proficient in an art is to acquire the capacity for doing something; to become proficient in a science is to acquire knowledge concerning something. So long as the student treats language-study as a science he will make little or no progress in the art of using language.

Now, there are two possible ways of acquiring proficiency in an art; the one consists in applying theory, the other consists in persistent efforts to imitate the successful performances of others. Let us say that the student wishes to use the French equivalent of ‘she went.’ By the method of theory he will remember that past actions are generally expressed by the French passÉ indÉfini (or perfect); he will then remember that this tense is formed by means of one of the two auxiliaries plus the past participle. His knowledge of theory will tell him to derive from the infinitive aller the past participle allÉ; theory will also tell him that this particular verb requires the auxiliary Être and not avoir, and that the present tense third person singular of Être is est. If he is writing the sentence, he must remember that the participle must in this case agree with the subject and be spelt allÉe.

By the method of practice he will merely reproduce by imitation the sentence elle est allÉe, which sentence he will have had occasions of learning or of reading. In both cases there is the possibility of error; the theory may be imperfectly known and one or more links in the chain of reasoning may be weak, or the sentence may have been badly memorized.

First attempts at imitation are sometimes inaccurate; our initial attempts at reproducing are occasionally unsuccessful; we wish to produce a foreign sound we have just heard, but utter a native sound instead; we wish to produce a foreign sentence, but construct it wrongly; we wish to express a certain thought, and fail to hit upon the right word. For this reason the method of practice is often termed the method of trial and error. We are told that some of our efforts will be successful and others unsuccessful, and that in the course of practice we shall gradually eliminate the unsuccessful ones. We are even told that it is only by making mistakes that we learn not to make them. Although we may admit a modicum of truth in this somewhat hyperbolical dictum, we would suggest that it is liable to misinterpretation. Nor is the term trial and error an ideal one from the language-teacher’s point of view.

In both cases there is an implication that all successful attempts must necessarily be preceded by unsuccessful ones, which is not only untrue but unsound pedagogy. The literal interpretation of the term and doctrine may induce a sort of fatalistic attitude, and the principle of accuracy (which we shall deal with later) will suffer in consequence. It may provide teacher and student with an easy pretext to condone careless work. The student may say, “Since it appears that error must precede perfection, I will not unduly strive towards accuracy.” The teacher may say, “Since psychologists tell us that error is inevitable, I will allow my pupil to do inaccurate work.”

It may be true that some forms of inaccuracy in certain conditions tend to eliminate themselves in the course of time and practice, but it is certainly true that errors also tend to become habitual, and no psychologist has ever maintained that the forming of bad habits is a necessary step towards the acquisition of good ones. We would lay stress on this point, for there seems to be a real danger in the misapplication of such terms as ‘trial and error,’ ‘the selection of the successful and the rejection of the unsuccessful efforts,’ ‘practice makes perfect,’ etc. Misunderstanding on this point has caused many teachers to encourage, and many students to acquire, pidgin-speech, and to consider it as the inevitable or even indispensable prelude to normal speech.

In the present chapter we are inquiring what are the processes of nature and how we may train the student to observe them. We have just seen that there is a method of theory and a method of practice; it is fairly evident that the latter is a natural process and that the former is not. We will now proceed to set forth another pair of rival processes and determine which is the one followed by the natural language-teaching forces.

When we are young we form new habits with facility; a new sort of work has to be performed, and we proceed to acquire the new habit which will enable us to perform it. When we are older we form new habits with greater difficulty and certainly with greater reluctance. We make all sorts of efforts (generally unconsciously) to avoid forming a new habit, for in some respects the adult seems to dread novelty.

A new sort of work has to be performed, and instead of acquiring the new habit or habits which will perform it we select habits already formed and strive to make them do the new work. Let us take a few examples in order to realize what this means. Suppose we wish to make Chinese characters with a native writing-brush. This is a new sort of work; in order to do it successfully we must hold the brush vertically in a way we have never held a brush before; we must form a new brush-holding and brush-using habit. But the average European adult will strive to use the brush and to trace the characters by holding the brush as he holds a pen; he will be using the known pen-holding habit instead of acquiring the unknown habit of holding a writing-brush.

Or we wish to learn to pronounce the vowel generally represented in French by É. This will require a muscular habit unknown to the average Englishman. What does he do? He seeks immediately to replace the required new effort by a known effort—and replaces the French É by the English ay. If this is too unsatisfactory he will strive to modify his ay until it seems to resemble sufficiently the required sound. Similarly, he will substitute for French au, u, or on, English o (as in ‘boat’), ew (as in ‘new’), and ong.

Or the English adult student may wish to learn to use French word-groups or sentences, in which case we shall almost invariably find that he only learns to use those which correspond most nearly to English constructions; he prefers to adapt his known syntax-habits rather than form new ones.

Now children have not this same reluctance to form new habits, either because their minds are more plastic, i.e. they are so used to forming new habits that a few more do not incommode them, or because they are not clever or intelligent enough to make the necessary selection from their stock of acquired habits.

Language-learning is essentially a habit-forming process, a process during which we must acquire new habits. It is, then, one of the cases where we cannot always proceed from the known to the unknown in the more obvious sense of the term; we must often consent to plunge (or be plunged) straight into the unknown.

The most important thing we have to do, then, is to train the student to form new habits and to cause him to refrain from adapting his old ones in cases where we know that such adaptation will be fruitless. We make this last qualification advisedly, because there are certain cases where successful adaptation is possible. A foreign language is not wholly different from our own tongue, and where identity exists obviously no new habit is required. (We must, however, see that the student selects the right previously acquired habit, that is to say, the nearest native equivalent.)

The capacity of forming new habits of observation, articulation, inflexion, compounding, or expression for every new language is one of our spontaneous capacities, and the student must when necessary be taught to form such new habits.

Another very characteristic feature of the natural process is unconscious assimilation; we learn without knowing that we are learning. What we therefore have to do is to train ourselves (or our students) consciously to learn unconsciously; we must set out deliberately to inhibit our capacities for focusing or concentrating our attention on the language-material itself. Attention must be given to what we want to say and not to the way we say it.

How shall we do it?

In the first place we must set out to sharpen our powers of receiving and retaining knowledge communicated to us orally. This may be difficult; we have become so accustomed to acquiring information from the written word via the eyes that we feel very bewildered and incapable when deprived of this medium. We hear a foreign word or sentence, and this auditory impression is such a rapid and transitory one that we feel that we cannot possibly retain it in our memory; we feel that we require at least one good look at the word so that we may hereafter reproduce in our imagination the written form. But we must resist this tendency; we must discipline ourselves to forgo this artificial aid to memory, for ear-memory cannot be cultivated while we are visualizing. If we truly desire to tap the natural language-learning energies we must obey nature; we must train and drill our ears to do the work for which they were intended. If we make up our minds to train our ears to be efficient instruments we can do so: a little patience, a little practice, and we shall surely regain the power that we had allowed to lapse.

The exercises we use in order to sharpen our ear-perceptions and to make them serve us may be termed ‘ear-training exercises.’ This term may not satisfy those who delight in hair-splitting definitions; they may say, “We cannot train our ears, but we can train our capacities for using them”; but the term is sufficiently accurate to designate what we mean it to designate.

How are ear-training exercises performed? There are several varieties. The simplest of all is this: the teacher articulates various sounds, either singly or in combination with others; we listen to these sounds and make unconscious efforts to reproduce them by saying them to ourselves. This is the most passive and most natural form of ear-training; we did it years ago when lying in our cradles listening to the sounds made by the people around us. If the teacher systematizes his work, so much the easier will it be for us who are training our ears.

We must then seek to recognize or identify certain sounds and to distinguish them from others. The teacher may write (in conventional phonetic symbols) a series of sounds on the blackboard and append to each a conventional number. He will articulate a sound and ask us to give him the number pertaining to it, or we may go up to the blackboard and point to the sound we think we have heard, or he may give us ‘phonetic dictation,’ in which case he will articulate sounds which we must write down by means of these conventional phonetic symbols. This latter process has the advantage that it can subsequently be extended to the dictation of syllables or words.[1]

Other forms of ear-training exercises may be devised by those who are engaged in carrying out such work, care being taken that such exercises do really train the ears and not our capacities for successful guessing.

If you wish to know to what extent such exercises do have the desired effect, go through a short course of ear-training on these lines and you will yourself be a witness to their efficacy.

Ear-training is not confined to isolated sounds and simple combinations of sounds; it also includes the exercise of our capacities for perceiving or retaining long strings of syllables such as sentences. We are able to do this in the case of our mother-tongue, and there is no reason why we should not soon become fairly proficient in doing it in the case of a foreign language.

The next thing in importance is to learn how to articulate foreign sounds, singly, in simple combinations, or in long strings of syllables. We must train our mouth and our vocal organs generally; in some cases we must develop certain muscles in order that they may do easily and rapidly what is required of them. We have learnt to do this in the case of our mother-tongue, and we can learn to do the same for sounds which are so far unknown to us. It is never too late in life to develop a muscle in order that it may perform the small amount of work which will be required of it. We must go through a course of mouth-gymnastics; if we are disinclined to do so it means that we are disinclined to take the trouble to tap our natural language-learning resources.

What are articulation exercises? Like ear-training exercises, they exist in many varieties. We begin by practising on known sounds. We take simple sounds and learn to prolong them for a few seconds or to utter them rapidly, and we practise them in new and unfamiliar combinations. We are shown how to convert voiced into voiceless sounds and vice versa; we are taught how to produce sounds which are intermediate between two known sounds; we are shown how to convert known sounds into their nasal, lip-rounded, or palatalized forms, etc. We are trained to imitate strange noises of all sorts, and the phonetician is ready to show us how to make them. Our ear-training exercises will be of assistance to us, for it is easier to articulate sounds that we recognize than sounds which have so far been unfamiliar to our ears.

At a more advanced stage, articulation exercises gradually become merged into ‘fluency exercises.’ When we are asked to articulate a given string of syllables so many times in so many seconds we are learning to become fluent, to connect sound with sound and syllable with syllable without ugly gaps and awkward hesitations.

While ear-training and articulation exercises are being carried on the student should be encouraged to develop his powers of mimicry; after having heard on many different occasions words or strings of words uttered by the teacher he should strive to become at least as proficient as parrots and phonograph records in reproducing them spontaneously. The term imitation is not adequate to express the process by which he should work; what we require is absolute mimicry. Sounds, with all that appertains to them—pitch, timbre, length, abruptness, drawl, distinctness, and any other qualities and attributes possessed by them—should be mimicked faithfully and accurately; little or no distinction should be made by the learner between the characteristic pronunciation of the language he is learning and the personal pronunciation of his teacher. The teacher, indeed, should say to the student, “Don’t be content with a mere reproduction of what you imagine to be my standard of pronunciation; go further and mimic me.”

Ear-training, articulation, and mimicry exercises will carry us a long way towards our aim; when fairly proficient in these, we shall find little difficulty in reproducing at first hearing a sentence which has been articulated to us. This is one of our most important aims; once able to do this, we are able to avail ourselves immediately of one of the most valuable channels for acquiring the foreign language; we are able to assimilate foreign sentences by ear; every sentence repeated in our hearing will have its due effect in furthering our knowledge of the language and our capacity for using it.

Anyone who is unable to repeat with tolerable accuracy any sentence he has just heard is certainly unable to assimilate the foreign language by spontaneous methods. He may seek to compensate this inability by methods involving the imagery of the written word, but these methods will be unnatural ones and will inhibit the development of the spontaneous powers. Anyone who experiences a difficulty in repeating a foreign sentence which he has just heard will be severely handicapped in his subsequent work, for he will be paying attention to his hearing and articulation when he should be devoting his attention to other things. Indeed, we would go so far as to say that the power of correctly reproducing a string of syllables just heard is one of the essential things we must possess in order to make any real progress in the acquisition of the spoken language.

It is this power which enables us to memorize on a wide scale sentences and similar strings of words. Whether we like it or not, whether the prospect is encouraging or not, it is quite certain that an easy command of the spoken (and even of the written) language can only be gained by acquiring the absolute mastery of thousands of combinations, regular and irregular. We shall see later that certain forms of synthetic work exist which will enable us to form correctly an almost unlimited number of foreign sentences; we shall see that the utilizing of these studial forms of work will carry us very far on our way to acquire the language; but, ingenious and sound though they may be, they will not replace the cruder and more primitive process of memorizing integrally a vast number of word-groups.

Now this task cannot be accomplished by means of intensive and laborious repetition work; it cannot be accomplished by the traditional methods of memorizing; book-work and perseverance will never lead us to the goal of our memorizing ambitions. As we shall see later, in the early stages a certain amount of deliberate and conscious memorizing must be done; we shall insist on the daily repetition of a certain number of useful compounds, but sooner or later we shall come to a stage in which memory-work must be carried out on a far larger scale and in a far more spontaneous manner. We must train ourselves to become spontaneous memorizers, and this can only be done in one way: we must acquire the capacity for retaining a chance phrase or compound which has fallen upon our ears in the course of a conversation or speech. It is in this way that we have acquired those thousands of phrases and combinations which make up the bulk of our daily speech in our own language. We have acquired the capacity of noting and retaining any new combinations of English words which we may chance to hear; we do this unconsciously, and are not aware of doing so; we rarely or never invent new types of compounds, but simply reproduce at appropriate moments those types of compounds which we have happened to hear used by those speaking in our presence. This is one of the habits we acquired in our infancy; this is one of the habits we must revive now and use for the foreign language we are studying. So long as we have not acquired this habit our progress will be slow—too slow for the purpose we have in view.

At a later stage of our study, it is true, we may make such acquisitions by reading instead of listening, but this will only be after we have become proficient in reproducing what we hear. We may be inclined to think that we assimilate new linguistic material by the eye alone, but this is not the case; the eye alone cannot assimilate. It may be taken as proved to-day that all normal people ‘inner-articulate’ all that they read, that we are indeed incapable of understanding what we read unless a process of ‘inner-articulating’ is going on at the same time. We need not stop at present to inquire exactly what is the psychological definition and explanation of this inner-articulating; we may content ourselves for the moment by defining this process as a sort of ‘mental repetition.’[2] It is well known that deaf-mute children who have been taught to read and to write never acquire the power of writing their ‘native language’ as normally used; they produce an artificial variety which reads as if it were written by a foreigner. Nor is this to be wondered at; it is perfectly in accordance with what might be expected; deaf-mutes cannot articulate, either aloud or mentally; they are therefore compelled to learn by studial methods, and they acquire language as slowly and as painfully as anyone acquires a foreign language by mere studial methods.

To learn to repeat mentally exactly what we hear, neither more nor less, without the intervention of any other elements than those of hearing and articulating, is, then, one of the things we must do if we wish to avail ourselves of the help which nature is ready to afford us.

Another of the spontaneous capacities with which we are endowed is that of understanding the gist of what we hear without any intervention of analysis or synthesis. Some people seem never to have lost this power. It suffices that they should have a certain number of opportunities of listening to the language being used for them to be able to gather the general sense of what they hear. Others do not appear to possess this ‘gift’; they cannot understand anything they have not analysed and reduced to its component units. In reality, if they would refrain from so analysing what they hear (or even read) they would soon find themselves able to do as well in this respect as the ‘gifted.’ We therefore suggest that a programme of this sort should include a certain number of exercises designed expressly to develop this power of direct understanding.

What sort of exercises should these be? They are many and varied. The essential feature should be the rigid exclusion of all opportunities for reasoning, calculation, analysis, or synthesis. The pupil must not be allowed to focus his consciousness on the structure of the language; he must keep his attention on the subject-matter. The natural law in this respect would seem to be that we shall come to understand what we hear provided that we fix our minds not on the actual words used but on the circumstances which result in the words in question. Interest must be present. If you are not interested directly or indirectly in what you hear, you may listen and listen for months or even years without understanding what you hear. If, on the other hand, things are said in your presence concerning matters which affect even distantly your welfare or which are connected with your interests or surroundings, you will have a tendency to grasp the meaning of what is said. We must endeavour to devise a series of exercises which fulfil these conditions; we must design forms of work in which the student’s attention shall be directed towards the subject-matter and away from the form in which it is expressed. Gradation, however, must be observed if we wish to obtain fairly rapid results, we must first work with a comparatively limited vocabulary, we must use an abundance of gesture, we must avail ourselves of everything likely to further our aim. In so doing, however, we must avoid the other extreme; if we are too careful in our choice of words, if we speak too slowly and over-emphasize our speech, the process of understanding will be too conscious; we shall be fostering habits of conscious study and of focused attention, things which are very good in their way, but which are not calculated to further the particular end we have at present in view.

The most natural form of work, indeed the first form of work which suggests itself to us, consists in talking to our pupils, talking to them naturally and fluently, talking to them about anything which may conceivably be of interest to them. We may show them the different parts of the room in which the lessons are given, the furniture, objects on the table or in our pockets, and while showing them we name them and speak about them. We may perform all sorts of actions and say what we are doing; we may describe the position of the various objects, their qualities and attributes; we may show pictures and describe them. These elementary talks will gradually develop; we may pass by easier stages from the concrete to the abstract; in the end we shall be relating (and even reading) simple stories, and our listeners will come to follow our thoughts and understand what we are saying, even as we understood the simple stories for which we clamoured in our nursery days.

Another form of work, called ‘imperative drill,’ consists in giving orders in the foreign language to the pupils to perform certain actions (stand up, sit down, take your book, open it, shut it, etc.). In the initial stage such orders will be accompanied by the necessary gestures; the students will not be slow to grasp what is required of them, and in a very short time they will respond automatically to the stimulus provided by the foreign imperative sentence.

Another form of exercise designed to cultivate the capacity of immediate comprehension is that in which we require our pupils to answer yes or no (oui or non, ja or nein, etc.) to hundreds of questions which we ask them, (Is this your book? Is the sky blue? Am I speaking to you? Are we in France? etc., etc.)

Certain other simple forms of systematic questionnaire exercises will further develop the natural powers of comprehension, of associating the word with the thought. A type of exercise called ‘action-drill’ will have the same effect if carried out as a means to the particular end we have in view.

These then are the chief things to be done once we have decided to enlist on our behalf the universal and natural powers of language-using, and these are some of the various ways in which we may achieve our aim. All of them are possible and all of them can be carried out in actual practice by any teacher who has a sufficient command of the foreign language (and if he has not, we can hardly call him a competent teacher). Nothing has been suggested here which has not already been successfully carried out by those whose business it is to ascertain experimentally how languages are actually learned.

The initial stages of the language-course will be very largely characterized by these forms of work, in order that the student may be thoroughly prepared and mentally equipped for the later stages.