The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

While ear-training and articulation exercises are being carried on the student should be encouraged to develop his powers of mimicry; after having heard on many different occasions words or strings of words uttered by the teacher he should strive to become at least as proficient as parrots and phonograph records in reproducing them spontaneously. The term imitation is not adequate to express the process by which he should work; what we require is absolute mimicry. Sounds, with all that appertains to them—pitch, timbre, length, abruptness, drawl, distinctness, and any other qualities and attributes possessed by them—should be mimicked faithfully and accurately; little or no distinction should be made by the learner between the characteristic pronunciation of the language he is learning and the personal pronunciation of his teacher. The teacher, indeed, should say to the student, “Don’t be content with a mere reproduction of what you imagine to be my standard of pronunciation; go further and mimic me.”

Ear-training, articulation, and mimicry exercises will carry us a long way towards our aim; when fairly proficient in these, we shall find little difficulty in reproducing at first hearing a sentence which has been articulated to us. This is one of our most important aims; once able to do this, we are able to avail ourselves immediately of one of the most valuable channels for acquiring the foreign language; we are able to assimilate foreign sentences by ear; every sentence repeated in our hearing will have its due effect in furthering our knowledge of the language and our capacity for using it.

Anyone who is unable to repeat with tolerable accuracy any sentence he has just heard is certainly unable to assimilate the foreign language by spontaneous methods. He may seek to compensate this inability by methods involving the imagery of the written word, but these methods will be unnatural ones and will inhibit the development of the spontaneous powers. Anyone who experiences a difficulty in repeating a foreign sentence which he has just heard will be severely handicapped in his subsequent work, for he will be paying attention to his hearing and articulation when he should be devoting his attention to other things. Indeed, we would go so far as to say that the power of correctly reproducing a string of syllables just heard is one of the essential things we must possess in order to make any real progress in the acquisition of the spoken language.

It is this power which enables us to memorize on a wide scale sentences and similar strings of words. Whether we like it or not, whether the prospect is encouraging or not, it is quite certain that an easy command of the spoken (and even of the written) language can only be gained by acquiring the absolute mastery of thousands of combinations, regular and irregular. We shall see later that certain forms of synthetic work exist which will enable us to form correctly an almost unlimited number of foreign sentences; we shall see that the utilizing of these studial forms of work will carry us very far on our way to acquire the language; but, ingenious and sound though they may be, they will not replace the cruder and more primitive process of memorizing integrally a vast number of word-groups.

Now this task cannot be accomplished by means of intensive and laborious repetition work; it cannot be accomplished by the traditional methods of memorizing; book-work and perseverance will never lead us to the goal of our memorizing ambitions. As we shall see later, in the early stages a certain amount of deliberate and conscious memorizing must be done; we shall insist on the daily repetition of a certain number of useful compounds, but sooner or later we shall come to a stage in which memory-work must be carried out on a far larger scale and in a far more spontaneous manner. We must train ourselves to become spontaneous memorizers, and this can only be done in one way: we must acquire the capacity for retaining a chance phrase or compound which has fallen upon our ears in the course of a conversation or speech. It is in this way that we have acquired those thousands of phrases and combinations which make up the bulk of our daily speech in our own language. We have acquired the capacity of noting and retaining any new combinations of English words which we may chance to hear; we do this unconsciously, and are not aware of doing so; we rarely or never invent new types of compounds, but simply reproduce at appropriate moments those types of compounds which we have happened to hear used by those speaking in our presence. This is one of the habits we acquired in our infancy; this is one of the habits we must revive now and use for the foreign language we are studying. So long as we have not acquired this habit our progress will be slow—too slow for the purpose we have in view.

At a later stage of our study, it is true, we may make such acquisitions by reading instead of listening, but this will only be after we have become proficient in reproducing what we hear. We may be inclined to think that we assimilate new linguistic material by the eye alone, but this is not the case; the eye alone cannot assimilate. It may be taken as proved to-day that all normal people ‘inner-articulate’ all that they read, that we are indeed incapable of understanding what we read unless a process of ‘inner-articulating’ is going on at the same time. We need not stop at present to inquire exactly what is the psychological definition and explanation of this inner-articulating; we may content ourselves for the moment by defining this process as a sort of ‘mental repetition.’[2] It is well known that deaf-mute children who have been taught to read and to write never acquire the power of writing their ‘native language’ as normally used; they produce an artificial variety which reads as if it were written by a foreigner. Nor is this to be wondered at; it is perfectly in accordance with what might be expected; deaf-mutes cannot articulate, either aloud or mentally; they are therefore compelled to learn by studial methods, and they acquire language as slowly and as painfully as anyone acquires a foreign language by mere studial methods.

To learn to repeat mentally exactly what we hear, neither more nor less, without the intervention of any other elements than those of hearing and articulating, is, then, one of the things we must do if we wish to avail ourselves of the help which nature is ready to afford us.

Another of the spontaneous capacities with which we are endowed is that of understanding the gist of what we hear without any intervention of analysis or synthesis. Some people seem never to have lost this power. It suffices that they should have a certain number of opportunities of listening to the language being used for them to be able to gather the general sense of what they hear. Others do not appear to possess this ‘gift’; they cannot understand anything they have not analysed and reduced to its component units. In reality, if they would refrain from so analysing what they hear (or even read) they would soon find themselves able to do as well in this respect as the ‘gifted.’ We therefore suggest that a programme of this sort should include a certain number of exercises designed expressly to develop this power of direct understanding.

What sort of exercises should these be? They are many and varied. The essential feature should be the rigid exclusion of all opportunities for reasoning, calculation, analysis, or synthesis. The pupil must not be allowed to focus his consciousness on the structure of the language; he must keep his attention on the subject-matter. The natural law in this respect would seem to be that we shall come to understand what we hear provided that we fix our minds not on the actual words used but on the circumstances which result in the words in question. Interest must be present. If you are not interested directly or indirectly in what you hear, you may listen and listen for months or even years without understanding what you hear. If, on the other hand, things are said in your presence concerning matters which affect even distantly your welfare or which are connected with your interests or surroundings, you will have a tendency to grasp the meaning of what is said. We must endeavour to devise a series of exercises which fulfil these conditions; we must design forms of work in which the student’s attention shall be directed towards the subject-matter and away from the form in which it is expressed. Gradation, however, must be observed if we wish to obtain fairly rapid results, we must first work with a comparatively limited vocabulary, we must use an abundance of gesture, we must avail ourselves of everything likely to further our aim. In so doing, however, we must avoid the other extreme; if we are too careful in our choice of words, if we speak too slowly and over-emphasize our speech, the process of understanding will be too conscious; we shall be fostering habits of conscious study and of focused attention, things which are very good in their way, but which are not calculated to further the particular end we have at present in view.