THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF THE ELEMENTARY STAGE
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_ [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.