The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

CHAPTER III
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.