WHY WE MUST USE OUR STUDIAL CAPACITIES
We should not conclude that methods involving our powers of study are
to be abandoned, and that nature alone is to be responsible for our
linguistic education. On the contrary, we suggest that an extensive use
be made of powers which are not possessed by the young child or the
barbarian.
In the first place, nature will not teach us to read or to write, but
merely to become proficient in the use of the _spoken_ form of a given
language. However valuable it may be to possess the spoken form, most
of us wish to go beyond this; we wish eventually to be able to use some
form of orthography. Some even desire to go beyond this and to learn
to use shorthand or the typewriter, man-made inventions of a still
more recent date. For we must remember that, after all, traditional
orthography is not a whit more ‘natural’ than shorthand, and a good
deal less ‘natural’ than phonetic transcription or reformed spelling.
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”).