On the basis of the above negative criticism, we may perhaps formulate
the following positive requirements for those reading selections which
are to be the foundation for instruction in languages, namely that as
far as possible they must
(1) be connected, with a sensible meaning,
(2) be interesting, lively, varied,
(3) contain the most necessary material of the language first,
especially the material of everyday language,
(4) be correct French (German, etc.),
(5) pass gradually from that which is easy to that which is more
difficult,
(6) yet without too much consideration for what is merely
grammatically easy or difficult.
This order does not indicate the relative importance or value of the
requirements, which might be difficult to determine. If there should be
any disagreement between them, I suppose it is generally best to try to
find some practical compromise. We must now pass on to examine some of
these requirements more closely.
The use of _connected_ texts in the elementary teaching of languages
has already previously been tried, but it seems as if in the effort to
avoid the Scylla of disconnected sentences it has been impossible to
escape the Charybdis of such texts as Chateaubriand’s _Atala_, Dickens’
_Christmas Carol_ (Méthode Toussaint-Langenscheidt), the New Testament,
or Cæsar’s _Gallic War_, etc. How often after such experiments, when
the pupil was overwhelmed and did not learn anything because he was to
learn everything at once, has not the teacher returned in despair to
the disconnected sentences.
But between the two extremes there is no doubt room for the golden mean
of beginning with quite short connected pieces, and then gradually, as
each lesson may be lengthened, passing over to longer texts--of course
this does not necessarily mean that a whole piece must always be taken
for each lesson; the breaks in the lessons do not need to correspond to
the breaks in the text-book.
Anecdotes meet the requirements in so far as they are short connected
pieces, and therefore they play such an important part in many readers.
But yet they are not quite the thing, especially when they are used in
too great numbers. A pointed anecdote can only be really funny once;
if it is to be repeated many times, it soon becomes stale and indeed
more tiresome than most other things. And just the very quality which
makes it amusing makes it less valuable for teaching purposes; that is,
an anecdote must by its very nature contain as few words as possible;
but it is better for beginners to get a little broader colouring, so
that the most necessary words and phrases may recur frequently. If many
anecdotes follow one upon the other, it is not easy to avoid frequent
jumps between totally different spheres of thought and accordingly
between totally different worlds of words; this increases the
difficulty, and the result is apt to be that words and expressions once
learned are soon forgotten. Anecdotes depending upon puns cannot be
appreciated at all without full familiarity with the words resembling
each other, and that can only in a minority of cases be assumed for our
pupils. The best way to use anecdotes in teaching languages is to let
them serve as spice in or in connection with other pieces, especially
descriptive pieces, so that the words used in the anecdotes may there
appear in their natural surroundings. This can best be done in short
stories about animals; in my own books for beginners in English, I
have taken several such pieces from purely scientific works by Sir
John Lubbock, Romanes, Tylor, etc. I mention these as examples of a
kind of texts which seem to me to be especially attractive (but which
are neither so easy to get hold of nor to concoct), because they
give entertaining and sensible information about things which are
often neglected in the natural science instruction itself, and at the
same time they give an opportunity of learning a good deal of useful
language-material without being too difficult. The pieces which are
merely descriptive of nature, and which Sweet lays so much stress upon,
have the advantage that they in a still greater degree allow of the
employment of the most indispensable material of language, and that
a number of the sentences may be made self-explanatory (_v._ below).
There are, however, but relatively few subjects that can be dealt with
in this way--the most elementary natural phenomena--and when they are
not written in such a masterly manner as in Sweet’s _Elementarbuch des
gesprochenen Englisch_, there are apt to be so many well-known truths
told in these pieces that the interest flags.
In deciding on what will be of interest as a selection for reading,
differences in age must of course to a great extent be taken into
consideration. But it is an experience which I myself have had, and in
which many teachers bear me out, that beginners in a foreign language
may very well be interested in certain reading matter even if they are
beyond the age when corresponding things would interest them in their
native language. So one must not be afraid of childish texts; but by
this I do not mean to recommend a certain kind of juvenile literature
which flourishes in all countries, and which aunts, especially the
unmarried ones, often think that children appreciate, and so they
themselves also proceed to produce it in large quantities, that is,
milk-and-water stories and verses about the reward of good children
and the frightful punishment of the naughty ones; both young and
old find such “literature” nauseating, and it were best to avoid it
in text-books in foreign languages. But there is another class of
literature, that collected by folklorists, which is orally transmitted
from generation to generation, and which shows its vigour by being
continually amusing and by continually shooting new shoots. Much of it
can successfully be used in teaching languages; and that which amuses a
French child of five or six years may often amuse an English child of
ten or eleven or even more, because in the foreign language it gets
the charm that always is connected with the unknown.
Much of this material--and of other material, which, without belonging
to popular tradition, is related to it--is in verse-form, which has
the great advantage for our purpose, that rhythm and rhyme naturally
rivet the words and expressions fast to each other, so that the
memory gets hold of them like an unbreakable chain. It is only with
great difficulty and with much repetition that prose sentences can be
inculcated in a certain given form; but to learn verse is like play--it
learns itself. If therefore the poetry of art, with its more or less
unnatural language, is unsuitable for the beginner, the little witty
natural verses of the genuine children’s literature are, on the other
hand, excellent. But of course not even these are always pure pearls,
and there are many of them to be rejected as containing impertinences,
nonsense-words, fragments of antiquated language, or words which
beginners have no use for; it seems to me, for instance, that Viëtor
and Dörr should not have transferred the nursery rhymes wholesale (even
the old forms with _--th_ in the third person, and much more) into
their otherwise excellent English reader.
With respect to the requirement that the reading must be _easy_--or
rather that there must be gradual progress from easy to difficult--it
must be recognized that difficulty may depend upon several different
things.
In the first place, the subject-matter may be too difficult; it ought
never to be beyond the horizon of the pupils. As previously remarked,
in the very beginning, one may even take something simpler than what
would otherwise be suitable for persons of that age. But later, on
the other hand, the subject-matter ought not to be too light; it is
well, as soon as possible, to use matter which really has a permanent
value of its own. A large part of the reading will no doubt always
be taken from lighter literature, and most of it will not cause any
real difficulty as far as the comprehension of the subject-matter is
concerned. But in addition to that, there ought surely to be read to a
far greater extent than has hitherto been the case in modern language
instruction, matter which cannot be understood without some serious
thinking, articles on natural science and on human relations in the
widest sense of the word, political speeches, etc. Many teachers seem
to be afraid to read anything else with their pupils than the most
insignificant novel-literature whose contents furnish starvation food.
A little friend of mine seven years old once said to his mother: “I
like that best which I can scarcely understand.” He thereby expressed
the same thought as Dante when he said that man is not happy unless
he strains every nerve, or Stuart Mill in his remark: “A pupil who is
never required to do what he cannot do never does what he can do.” All
instruction must spur the pupil on with problems that are not too easy;
in the first stage of instruction in languages, there are problems
enough in the purely linguistic difficulties; later on the contents
of the reading, too, ought to require some independent powers of
assimilation. Sometimes it may even be best to choose selections where
the language is very easy, but the matter rather weighty--especially
in teaching according to the reform-method, where subject-matter is
necessarily assigned a more important part than hitherto, and where
even an easy text can in various ways be advantageously employed as a
means of training in purely linguistic skill.
Even linguistic easiness or difficulty may depend upon different
things. Difficulties in pronunciation ought not to be piled up, a
caution applying especially to selections for the very first beginners.
Some teachers try to begin with words which may be almost or wholly
pronounced with sounds occurring in the native language of the pupils.
Aside from the fact that in most cases it only leads to disappointment
to exaggerate the resemblance between the foreign and native sounds,
this principle may easily lead to slovenliness at a stage when it might
involve the most dangerous consequences. The pupil ought from the
very first lesson to have the clearest sensation of being on foreign
ground, and he ought to realize that the foreign sounds cannot be
learned without work. But the difficult sounds ought not to occur too
many in succession or in too difficult combinations. It is perhaps best
to begin with words of one syllable, but this need not be strictly
carried through. I do not, however, attach so much importance to mere
difficulties in pronunciation that I would advise an otherwise suitable
opening selection in a French reader for beginners to be discarded
because it contained such difficult words as _manger_ and _chien_. It
cannot be long, anyway, before the pupils must make acquaintance with,
and, what is more, master all the sounds in the language they are about
to learn. By difficulties in pronunciation here I mean the real ones,
and not such apparent difficulties as are due to freaks of orthography;
it is equally troublesome for a German to pronounce English _pear_ and
_pair_; such difficulties as are found in English _scarce_, _fatigue_,
_victuals_, French _eut_, _pupille_, _pitié_, _balbutier_, etc., may be
overcome by a panacea which I shall come to later, namely, phonetical
transcription.
Furthermore linguistic difficulty may be due to the use of too many
new words, and in this respect the best principle at all stages is: as
few new words as possible. Every one who has read such pages as often
occur in Zola or Daudet, where technical expressions are abundantly
piled up, will have had the experience that even with the most careful
reading or study it did not take long before all the new words were
just as unfamiliar as before the selection was read. Likewise, when one
sets to work to learn systematic vocabularies like Plötz’s _Vocabulaire
Systématique_, it requires enormous exertion and a long time to learn
them, and it takes an amazingly short time to unlearn them again. But
if, in the course of one’s reading, the new words turn up occasionally
at relatively large intervals, then the mind is able to absorb the
one before the next appears; the intervening passages, which contain
only familiar things, manure the soil, as it were, for the new things
that are to be sown in it. Ten or twelve new words are more easily and
more thoroughly learned when they are scattered over five pages than
when they are crowded into ten lines, and then besides there is the
benefit to be derived from the recurrence of a number of usual words,
to say nothing of sentence-constructions, etc., so that he who has read
those five pages has had more opportunity to familiarize himself with
the idiosyncrasies of the foreign language than he would have had in
ten lines; the apparent waste of time in reading the longer piece has
really been profitable, for the capital which had already been acquired
in the language has in that time borne interest and compound interest.
Now since it is also better, as we have said, to learn five absolutely
necessary words than twenty-five of less importance, it is of course
the duty of the editors of text-books in large part to revise the
selections which they reprint, so that that which is of linguistic
value for the pupils may be cultivated at the expense of everything
that is unusual or odd. Texts whose subject-matter is good, but whose
language makes them impossible for our purpose, may often be made
pedagogically practicable by means of curtailing, paraphrasing, and
adaptation in various ways; many popular fairy-tales in the collections
of folklorists may be used if one only will take the trouble to
translate them from the dialect in which they are written. Such a
splendid little story as Mrs. Ewing’s _Jackanapes_, which is frequently
read as it stands in German and Swedish schools, is, according to my
judgment, too full of literary expressions and unnecessary words to be
easily comprehended by our little pupils. In the passage which I have
selected for my own primer, I have therefore in several places made
considerable omissions, and the style has throughout been made more
colloquial and direct, by means of corrections like these for instance:
having _ceased to entertain_ (given up) any hopes of his own recovery.
| Tony tumbled off _during the first revolution_ (before he had gone
round once). | And what bright eyes _peeped out of his dark forelock
as it was blown by the wind_! (he had!) | told him that he must _be on
his very best behaviour_ (behave properly) during the visit. If it had
been _feasible_ (possible) to leave off calling him Jackanapes and to
get used to his _baptismal_ (real Christian) name of Theodore before
the day after to-morrow _it would have been satisfactory_ (she would
have done it) | said J., shaking his yellow _mop_ (hair), and leaning
back in his _one of the two Chippendale_ armchairs _in which they sat_
(the italicized words left out) | _took their early promenade_ (went
out for their walk) earlier than usual | His golden hair flew out, _an
aureole from which his cheeks shone red and distended with trumpeting_
(left out). It is very probable that on comparing the original with
the revised text, it will be found that some of the colouring has been
lost; I merely maintain that the pupils gain thereby. The more it is
insisted upon (as according to the reform-method) that the selections
are not only to be read but also to be mastered, so that their language
becomes the mental property of the pupil, the more necessary is such
revision. It is clear that as the pupil progresses, the texts may
become more and more literary, and for various reasons the advisability
of such curtailing and adaptation becomes more questionable.
As a sample of such revision, I shall reprint a part of an anecdote,
(A) as it ought not to be given in a book for beginners (but as it
stands in a certain English reader for foreigners) and (B) as it stands
in Sweet’s excellent edition:--
(_A_) His table, however, is constantly set out with a dozen covers,
and served by suitable attendants. Who, then, are his privileged
guests? No less than a dozen of favourite dogs, who daily partake
of my lord’s dinner, seated very gravely in armchairs, each with
a napkin round his neck, and a servant behind to attend to his
wants. These honourable quadrupeds, as if grateful for such delicate
attentions, comport themselves during the repast with a decency
which would do more than honour to a party of gentlemen; but if by
any chance one of them should, without due consideration, obey his
natural instinct, and transgress any of the rules of good manners,
his punishment is at hand.
(_B_) Every day he used to have dinner laid for twelve guests besides
himself; but no one was ever invited to the house. Who were the
twelve covers laid for then, do you think? For twelve dogs. Each dog
had a velvet chair to sit up in, and a napkin round his neck, and
a footman behind his chair to wait on him. The older dogs always
behaved in the most gentlemanly manner, but it sometimes happened
that one of the younger dogs forgot his manners, and snatched a chop
or a piece of pudding off the plate of the dog that was sitting next
to him.
Finally the difficulties may be grammatical. These are the difficulties
that teachers have been most afraid of according to the old methods,
so that they have even preferred to give up almost all sense and
connection in the subject-matter rather than make a break in the
systematical progress in grammar. Such a form as _pu_ was not allowed
to occur before the pupils had learned the whole conjugation of
_pouvoir_ _pouvant_ _pu_ _je peux_, etc.; these forms must be learned
connectedly, it was said. But the irony of it all is that this
“connectedly” means that they are learned out of all connection--and
therefore to little profit. When the pupil is required to “understand”
the forms which occur in his reader, it will be found on closer
examination that this means merely that, for instance, _il a_ is
understood by the one who knows that it is 3 pers. sing. pres. of
_avoir_, or who at least knows the formula _j’ai_, _tu as_, etc.;
that _yeux_ is “understood” by the one who has learned that it is an
irregular plural belonging to the singular _œil_, etc.; in short, to
“understand” means here to know where the form in question belongs in
the grammatical system; and the forms must be given in exactly the same
order in which they are arranged in the grammar, the present before
the past tense, etc. But what has the beginner got to do with all this
system? The idea is not carried out consistently either, for when all
the exercises on accidence have been gone through, it is generally
the rule to pass over to connected (unrevised) texts, where such a
form as _puisse_ may occur, but the only thing that the pupils get to
know about it is that it is subjunctive, for it may easily take a year
or two before they learn why the subjunctive is used. Why is syntax
less important than accidence? To be quite consistent, it ought no
more to be permissible for a syntactical phenomenon than for a form
in accidence to occur before the corresponding grammatical section
has been learned. But since it seems to be inevitable that we must be
inconsistent on some point or other, it is no use beating about the
bush; in other words, we must not be afraid of using irregular forms
in the very first selection.
Grammatical irregularities, viewed from a pedagogical point of view,
fall into two entirely different classes, which are too apt to be
treated as if they were co-ordinate. In the first place, all languages
contain a number of irregularities which play a most insignificant part
both in life and in literature, because they occur so seldom. When the
users of the language produce them at long intervals, it is generally
with the utmost caution, because they merely have a hazy conception of
what the proper form of the expressions ought to be. But they are taken
up in the grammars, and as soon as one grammarian has caught sight of
one of them, it is carefully copied in all succeeding grammars for
the sake of completeness. Foreign grammarians are even more inclined
than the natives to pay attention to everything of that kind because
they have no instinctive feeling of what is rare and what is common.
In some English grammars which are used on the Continent, there may
still be found _I catched_, _I digged_, _I shined_, _I writ_, as the
preterite forms of _I catch_, _I dig_, _I shine_, _I write_; in one,
I find given as two different verbs _I weet_, _wit_ or _wot_, past
tense _wot_, and _I wis_, past tense _I wist_. What a big mistake it
is to include such musty and impracticable forms, we can best judge
from our own language--but in those French and German grammars which
we ourselves write there are things which are just as bad as the above
offences in English. When I went to school, I learned the following
rule about the plural of _travail_, “_Travail_ has _travails_ in the
plural when it means a report from a minister to the king or from a
subordinate official to the minister; likewise when it means a machine
to hold unruly horses, while they are being shoed.” This rule is thus
criticized by Storm: “Now I must say I have read many hundreds of
French books in my day, but so far as I remember, I have never come
across _travails_ in modern literature! In the sense of report, it
occurs in Mme. de Sévigné. An educated Frenchman, when asked if the
word was used with that meaning, answered me that he thought it was
no longer used. So one would expect that the word had long ago ceased
to have any show in modern grammars, but it seems to be continually
creeping in again.”
However, it is easy enough to take a position with respect to this
first kind of irregularities; they ought to be removed from the
instruction as radically as possible; they ought to be weeded out
root and all to a far greater extent than has yet been done in most
text-books, even if it must be admitted that something has been
done in this direction of late years. It is quite another matter
when we come to the other kind of irregularities, which are found
in the very commonest words, in words like German _ist_ _war_,
_kann_ _konnte_, _geht_ _ging_, _ich_ _mein_, _mann_ _männer_. Those
irregularities the pupil must learn, and learn thoroughly--there is
no doubt about that. The only question is, at what stage? before or
after the regular inflections? Most teachers will answer, after.
That a systematic grammar first gives what is normal, that which can
be expressed in general, comprehensive rules, and then afterwards
mentions the exceptions, the isolated phenomena, that of course is
all right. But it does not necessarily follow that the pupils ought
to familiarize themselves with the forms in the same order. What is
won thereby? Perhaps some advantage for the theoretical knowledge
about the language. But the loss incurred by this method of procedure
is undoubtedly far greater. For it will be found to be absolutely
impossible to arrange texts which are the least bit suitable without
using irregularly inflected words, so indispensable are they. The dread
of being unsystematic by taking up exceptions immediately is one of
the causes of the prevalence of the disheartening series of detached
sentences without any sensible meaning. It is only by freeing ourselves
from this principle which requires rules first and exceptions later
that we shall be able to get good texts for the teaching of beginners.
Furthermore, by beginning with the regular forms, we perhaps run the
risk that the pupils will analogically apply the rule even to the
exceptional words, whereas the irregular forms generally deviate so
much that they preclude the possibility of such mistakes. Those who
have learned that the plural in English is formed by adding _s_, may
perhaps construct such improper forms as _mans_, _childs_, but the
plural forms _men_ and _children_ are not apt to tempt the pupils to
inflect other words after the same pattern. But the moral of this is
not that we are to turn the customary method of procedure upside down,
and systematically learn the exceptions first. Here, too, nature must
be our guide; just as persons talking within a child’s hearing never
stop to consider if the words they are using are regular or not, so we
ought not to be too painfully careful in selecting or arranging the
first reading-exercises in a foreign language; we ought to choose what
is otherwise good and take the forms as they come, wasting no words
at this stage to explain their place in the system. In other words,
the deviating forms must be learned as if they were merely matters of
vocabulary. If in one of the first pieces there stands _Il y avait
une fois un roi et une reine_, it is enough for the time being if the
pupil is told that _il y avait_ = there was; the forms for “there is”
and “there has been” he can learn another time when he has use for
them, and then the teacher can refer back to this early piece and
remind the pupil about the related form which he learned before. For
beginners in French, _peux_--“can” is just as difficult (or easy) as
_peu_--“little,” and _faire_--“make, do,” as _fer_--“iron,” and it
makes no difference if the one is regular and the other irregular.
Indeed, an irregular plural like _geese_ is even easier for Danes than
the regular _bees_ (on account of the z-sound); likewise, it is easier
for an Englishman to learn the German irregular forms of comparison
_besser_ _best_ than regular forms like _süsser_ _süssest_. Later
when the time has come for a more systematic study of the grammar, it
will be rather an advantage that a number of the “exceptions” already
have occurred at so early a stage that they are not at all felt to be
strange and unusual.[4]
On the other hand, the beginner ought to be spared such grammatical
difficulties as are due to complicated sentence-structure. All
sentences ought from the very beginning to be constructed as evenly,
simply and clearly as possible; co-ordinate independent clauses ought
to be, if not the only, at least the predominating type of sentence.
Not even, for instance, in the second year of Latin instruction,
although there are just as many hours devoted to Latin in a year as
generally fall to the share of modern languages in the course of two
or three years, is it justifiable to let the pupils read the long
passages of indirect discourse in Cæsar; they ought not to occur until
the pupils are so far advanced that they could easily understand the
same matter when directly presented. This is also a point to be kept in
mind for any one who undertakes to revise the selections for reading
according to the suggestions given above.