The Principles of Language-Study — Reading Notes

they interfered with the processes by which nature causes us to assimilate and to remember, and the quality of his English suffered; it was to a certain extent ‘foreigner’s’ English, whereas his younger brothers spoke ‘English’ English.

And what happens in the case of the adult, of one who starts his second language from fifteen to twenty years after he has acquired the first? The same thing generally happens as in the last instance quoted, but in a more marked degree. The same interference takes place; the use of the eyes inhibits the use of the ears; the utilization of his conscious and focused attention militates against the proper functioning of the natural capacities of assimilation. Moreover, he is encouraged and trained to use the non-natural methods, he is directed by his teacher to pay attention to everything, to use his eyes, to memorize spellings (generally non-phonetic); his books show him how to analyse, they provide him with exercises calculated to make him concentrate on the detail, and in so doing to miss the synthetic whole. Examine the adult who is supposed to have ‘learnt’ a foreign language; in the majority of cases you will find that his speech is pidgin-speech, that his sounds are wrong and wrongly distributed, that his inflexions are inaccurate, that his sentences are constructed on the model of his native language, that he uses foreign words in a way unknown to the native users of these same words. Inquire in each case how the person acquired his knowledge, and you will find that he acquired it by dint of exercising his capacities for study.

And the minority? We find a minority (alas, a small minority!) who have come to possess the foreign language as if it were their first. Their sounds are right, the distribution is right, the inflexions are accurate, their sentences are constructed on the model of those used by the native speakers, they use foreign words as the natives themselves use them, they are as accurate and as fluent in the foreign language as in their own. They do not interrupt the speaker of the language with requests to speak more slowly, to speak more distinctly, to spell or to write the words; in short, they use the second language as they use their first. Inquire in each case how the person acquired his knowledge, and you will find that he acquired it by methods making no call on his capacities for reasoning, for concentrating, for analysing, or for theorizing. Instead of selecting and adapting previously acquired habits connected with his first language, he was able to form new habits.

To sum up our inquiry, we find that there are people who have been able to use their spontaneous capacities of assimilation in order to acquire a second or a third language; we find that young children nearly always do so, that certain adults sometimes do so.

But we must make quite sure of our ground before proceeding farther. We must ascertain definitely whether all adults possess what we are calling this spontaneous capacity for assimilation, or whether this is a ‘gift’ in the usual acceptation of the term, that is, whether it is a capacity given to some but withheld by nature from others. Some maintain that from the age of reason onwards none but the gifted possess the capacity in question, and that those who do not possess it are bound to use what we shall call the _studial_ processes. Others, on the contrary, maintain that all possess the capacity either in an active or in a latent state, that most adults deliberately but innocently inhibit their power, or that, unaware that these powers exist, they fail to take the necessary steps to awaken them from their latent into their active state.

Which of these two is the correct view?

Let us endeavour to answer this all-important question by examining those who undoubtedly do possess this ‘gift’ or natural capacity. We first inquire whether they were encouraged or disposed to resist the temptation to receive their impressions through the eyes, to resist the temptation to rely on spellings, whether they did consent to use their ears as the receptive medium. In each case we learn that they were so disposed; they did resist the temptation towards eye-work and did allow the ears to perform the work for which they were intended.

We next inquire whether the conditions were such as prohibited them from focusing their consciousness, from paying an exaggerated attention to detail, from submitting the language-matter to a form of analysis, from comparing each foreign word or form with some word or form of their native language. In each case we are informed that such _were_ the conditions.

Our next inquiry is directed towards ascertaining whether, in the earlier stages, the conditions afforded them full and constant opportunities of hearing the language used, _without being under the necessity of speaking it themselves_. In each instance we are informed that those were precisely the conditions.

This is almost conclusive; we have ascertained that each successful acquirer of the foreign language was working precisely under the conditions enjoyed by the young child (and we remember that the young child is invariably a successful acquirer of foreign languages). It is, however, not conclusive enough; we have yet to inquire under what conditions the other type of adult (the supposedly non-gifted one) had been working. We ask the same three sets of questions, and in answer we learn:

(_a_) That he was encouraged by his teachers to learn by the medium of his eyes, to base his knowledge on spellings (generally non-phonetic), and in so doing to inhibit his ears from fulfilling their natural function.

(_b_) That he generally focused his consciousness, that he paid attention to detail, that he studied rules and practised analysis, that he constantly established comparisons between the foreign word and the nearest native equivalent.

(_c_) That conditions were such that he had few or no opportunities of hearing the language used, while he was obliged to use the language himself, to forge out sentences as best he might, neglectful of accuracy and heedless of their conformity or non-conformity with authentic models.

This is conclusive; there is no doubt about it now. Those who seemingly do not possess the spontaneous capacity for assimilating _foreign_ languages are precisely those who were unwilling to avail themselves of it, or who were precluded from availing themselves of it. And by developing their studial powers they simply inhibited the spontaneous powers and effectively prevented them from working.

No reasonable doubt remains: we are all endowed by nature with certain capacities which enable each of us, without the exercise of our powers of study, to assimilate and to use the spoken form of any colloquial language, whether native or foreign. We may avail ourselves of these powers by training ourselves deliberately to utilize them, or, having more confidence in our studial efforts, or for some reason of special expediency, we may choose to leave our spontaneous capacities in their latent state and make no use of them. We cannot, however, afford to ignore them, and it would be foolish to deny their existence.

We shall see later what steps we must take if we wish to rouse these powers from their latent state, what we must do if we wish to enlist them and have them at our disposal for the purpose of learning or of teaching a foreign language.

OUR STUDIAL CAPACITIES AND HOW TO USE THEM

We have seen that each of us possesses certain spontaneous capacities for learning how to use the spoken form of any language or variety of language. We have seen that these capacities may be either in a latent or an active state. We have seen that unless we enlist these powers in our service we are unlikely to make any real progress in language-study, either in point of quality or quantity. We shall see later by what means we may awaken our latent capacities and cause them to become active, and, incidentally, how we can exercise ourselves to make the fullest use of them.

But we also possess capacities other than these for assimilating and using a language. It is our purpose in the present chapter to see what these are, and to differentiate between them and those already described.

In the first place, let us note carefully that we have so far dealt with no other form of language than the normal spoken colloquial, that form which is used under normal conditions by the average educated native. We have not been considering any written form of language whatever, either colloquial or classical, nor have we given any attention to the more classical or literary form of speech whether spoken or written. We have, indeed, alluded to these aspects or varieties of language, but merely in order to state that they are beyond the range of any truly _spontaneous_ capacities. Reading and writing are not spontaneous processes; they are even _unnatural_ processes if we do not already possess the spoken form. Learning how to use classical or artificialized forms of language such as poetry or rhetoric is a more or less studial process, an _unnatural_ process if we do not already possess the normal colloquial. For this, then, if not for other reasons, we must be prepared to adopt certain forms of work unknown to man in his natural state (as exemplified by the very young child); we shall allude to these as the ‘_studial_ methods.’

What, then, are these studial methods? Roughly speaking, we may say that they comprise all those forms of work which require on the part of the student _conscious efforts of attention_; work in which he must think, reflect, or calculate; work necessitating the exercise of his reasoning powers, work which cannot be performed automatically; this constitutes conscious work, and all methods embodying conscious work become _ipso facto_ studial methods.

Most work of analysis and synthesis is of this order; all that we do to break up a sentence into words, into syllables, into sounds; all that we do to piece together sounds, syllables, and words in order to form sentences is of this order. Whenever we are distinctly conscious of the words and constructions we are using, we are doing something unknown to nature. Whenever we come to understand a sentence by analysing it, or to utter a sentence by piecing together as we go on, we are working by processes of the studial order; they were not used when we were learning our mother-tongue.

All those forms of work which we may include under the heading of ‘conversion’ are studial, and these are many and varied. Dictation consists in causing the pupil to convert the spoken into the written aspect of language, reading consists in causing him to do the reverse, most forms of translating consist in causing him to convert something from one language into another. We may also at times require our pupils to convert an affirmative sentence into a negative or an interrogative one, to convert a present tense into a past, a singular into a plural, passive into active, to convert a certain word-order into another.

All these things are of the studial order; sound they may be, necessary or essential they may be, but they are not spontaneous forms of work, for we have not by their aid learnt to use the spoken colloquial form of our mother-tongue.

All methods which necessitate the use of the eye are studial methods; nature never meant us to learn spoken language by eye. We may therefore designate as studial all forms of reading, reading aloud or mental reading, reading from traditional orthographies or phonetic transcriptions, reading of isolated sounds or of connected passages. More especially of the studial order are those curious and complicated practices (common, alas! to so many students) of ‘reading what we hear’ or ‘writing what we speak.’ In the former case, we hear a sentence, we reduce it mentally to written characters, and read mentally what we see in our imagination; in the other case we write in our imagination what we wish to say, and read aloud what we are writing.

It follows that all methods which require us to use the hand are studial methods; nature knows no more of spellings and handwriting than she does of shorthand, typewriting, and type-setting; all these things are of comparatively recent origin, and all of them have been deliberately invented by man.

All methods which teach meanings by means of etymology are of the studial order; nature intended that each word should become attached to that for which it stands and not become associated with its ancestral etymon or modern cognates. The dictum of nature is that a word means what all speakers of the same language (or variety of language) mean it to mean.

Thus it would appear that nearly everything that the average person actually does when learning a foreign language comes under the heading of the studial processes. He learns rules in order to become proficient in analysis and synthesis; for the same purpose, he memorizes the exceptions to the rules. He becomes (or hopes to become) an expert in pulling words to pieces and in reconstructing them from roots and affixes, in sentence-making and sentence-breaking. He learns chiefly by eye, and expresses himself chiefly by the pen-grasping hand. Indeed, he becomes so proficient in converting the spoken into the written form that he cannot understand or retain the foreign words or sentences he learns until he has converted them into an imaginary written form which, in his imagination, he reads off word by word. Similarly, he finds himself only able to express himself by dint of reading aloud the sentences which he is constructing bit by bit by a complicated process of ‘mental writing.’ He aims at becoming (and often does become) expert in converting one language into another by a process (unknown to nature) called translating. His accuracy is gained by rapid conversions of words from one inflected form to another: nominatives into accusatives, singulars into plurals, infinitives into participles. He attaches great importance to etymology, and the time he might spend in associating words with their meanings is often devoted to working out the family tree of foreign words. He spends little time in finding out what meanings the natives attach to their words and forms, but much time in identifying the units of etymology and in tracing them from one language to another.

This does not necessarily imply that the student is always doing the wrong thing, nor that his methods are always bad ones; we merely observe that he uses (or is taught to use) all manner of studial methods at the expense of spontaneous ones, and that, in so doing, he develops his studial capacities of language-study at the expense of his spontaneous ones. The question whether the studial methods should be used at all and, if so, which should be used, forms the subject of the next chapter.

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.