The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

In short, observe the principle of concreteness by using examples, many examples, cumulative examples, real examples, and examples embodying the personal interest.

CHAPTER XIII
INTEREST

We have laid great stress on the necessity for drill-like work, for mechanical work, for exercises calculated to secure automatism, for habit-forming types of work. It has even seemed at times that we take a malicious pleasure in pillorying and condemning precisely those forms of work which are generally the most attractive to the average student. “The writer of this book,” some may say, “takes a savage delight in reproving teacher and student whenever they contemplate work of an interesting nature, heads them off whenever they approach anything resembling intellectual work, and turns them into channels of routine and repetition. He positively gloats over words like ‘automaticity,’ ‘passivity,’ ‘mechanism,’ or ‘unconscious assimilation,’ and apparently glories in the theory that language-learning like life itself should be ‘one demd horrid grind.’”

We readily plead guilty to a firm insistence on habit-forming exercises and drills, but continue to urge in mitigation that the practical study of language, the mastery of any form of actual speech, is a habit-forming process and little else. We must have the courage and honesty to face facts as we find them: a language cannot be mastered by learning interesting things about that language, but only by assimilating the material of which that language is made up.

But our attitude, far from being a pessimistic one, is positively optimistic. We are prepared to deny most emphatically that good drill-work is dull and uninteresting, and if some teachers make it so it is our duty to tell them not to. Those who have seen the sort of lessons that embody the forms of teaching which result from the rigid observance of these principles all testify that they are ‘live’ lessons (to use the term they most generally employ), that the students are keen and the teachers enthusiastic.

It is only too evident that every lesson must be made as interesting as is compatible with pedagogic soundness. Few people learn anything well unless they are interested in what they are learning. Hope of reward and fear of punishment are certainly stimuli to work, but very poor stimuli compared with that represented by interest. If the method is the machinery of language-study (or any other study for the matter of that), then interest is the motive power. Be the clock ever so well and ingeniously constructed, it will not go without some sort of mainspring; be the method ever so efficient as a method, it will not work unless the student is interested. All these statements are of course truisms and are accepted as axiomatic; the trouble comes when we discuss the means by which interest can be induced and maintained, for we are not all in agreement on this point.

There is, too, the question of intrinsic and extrinsic interest; the subject may be interesting in itself or it may derive an artificial sort of interest from some attendant circumstance, such as the hope of reward and fear of non-success and all that that may imply.

But a point arises at the outset which deserves our attention. A fallacy exists in connexion with interest, a fallacy which is the cause of much error and of much bad teaching. This fallacy when reduced to the absurd consists in saying, “We can make a subject of study interesting by changing the subject of study.” Now obviously it is absurd to say that we can make the study of French interesting by teaching geometry in its stead, or that we can make arithmetic interesting by replacing the arithmetic lesson by a history lesson. And yet this is the sort of thing that frequently does take place in some form or other.