It is necessary that the student shall learn how to understand spoken French, spoken English, or spoken Pekingese; it is assumed that the necessary phonetic and oral repetition work will be uninteresting, so we change the subject and teach the student to read French, English, or Mandarin Chinese, or to analyse these languages or to construct sentences in them by synthesis. Now reading and analysis and synthesis may to some people be more interesting than ear-training and oral memorizing, but whether this is the case or not it is certainly beyond the point. If we wish to learn to read, let us read; if we wish to do analytic and synthetic work, let us analyse and synthesize; but if the object of our study happens to be the command of the spoken language, it is no use to amuse ourselves by doing work which does not further our aim.
“Parrot-work is so monotonous, uninspiring, and uninteresting: let us rather translate the work of some author into our mother-tongue.” “I don’t find the study of the colloquial language elevating: I prefer to work at the classical.” Very well, we will not quarrel about tastes, but we will ask you to make it quite clear what you are setting out to learn and what your object really is; when we have ascertained that, we will see how we can make your path an easy and pleasant one. A journey to London may or may not be an interesting one, but if your object is to get to London it is no use taking a ticket to the Isle of Wight or to the Highlands of Scotland, however interesting such journeys may be.
The general tendency among educationalists to-day is towards interesting methods, methods involving the intelligent use of the intelligence, methods which develop the reasoning capacities, methods which form the judgment, which proceed from the trivial, familiar, and known towards the more profound, unfamiliar, and unknown. Geography is no longer a process of learning lists of place-names by heart, history is no longer represented as a catalogue of dates, arithmetic is taught by playing with cubes, chemistry is presented as a series of experiments in the laboratory, botany and geology are studied in the field. The old cramming process is being replaced by the method of discovery; the teacher furnishes the documents and the students discover the rules; the teacher suggests the problems and the pupils set their wits to work and find out the solutions. All of which is very interesting and, on the whole, very good.
There is, however, this danger: these interesting and mind-developing methods do not tend towards automatism and habit-formation; they are, indeed, not intended to foster any form of mechanical command.
Proficiency in shorthand cannot be gained by any method of discovery, and the capacity for doing good and rapid work on a typewriter is not attained by the heuristic method. Mathematics is a science, but the absolute mastery of the multiplication table is an art and cannot be gained by the exclusive practice of playing with cubes.
“The memorizing of the multiplication table is a wearisome grind; let us therefore make it interesting by teaching in its place the theory of numeration!” “Practising scales on the piano is monotonous and inartistic; let us therefore abolish such finger-gymnastics and replace all such work by the theory of harmony!” “Learning sentences by heart and performing these drills are so tedious; let us therefore reject these forms of work, and replace them by analysing a text or by trying our hand at literary composition!”
Now, as we have seen and proved to our satisfaction, language-learning is essentially a habit-forming process, is an art and not a science, and if we insist on considering as a science what is an art we are confusing the issues and creating a breeding-ground for all sorts of fallacies. Linguistics is a science, language-teaching is largely a science, but the practical study of languages is not; let us remember this primordial fact while we are endeavouring to make our subjects interesting.
What are the chief things making for interest? We suggest six rational and reasonable factors calculated to produce interest if not enthusiasm without any detriment to any of the eight other fundamental principles, viz.:
(1) The elimination of bewilderment.
(2) The sense of progress achieved.
(3) Competition.
(4) Game-like exercises.
(5) The right relation between teacher and student.
(6) Variety.