The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

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.