The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

(1) The Elimination of Bewilderment.—“I can’t make out what it’s all about! What on earth is the teacher driving at? I don’t understand these new terms nor the use of them. What is it all for? What good is it going to do me? I do hate this lesson!”

Have you ever heard comments of this sort? Have you ever made them yourself? The attitude of one making such comments (either openly or inwardly) is not a hopeful one; it gives no promise of successful work; it shows that interest is entirely lacking. What is the cause of this attitude, and how can we change it? Is it because the subject is too difficult? No, surely not, for some of the most difficult subjects may be most fascinating, even for the average student; difficulty often adds to the attractiveness of work and may even induce interest. Difficulty is not necessarily an unfavourable factor. But bewilderment invariably is!

There is an immense difference between difficult work and bewildering work; of difficulties there must necessarily be many, but of bewilderment there should be none.

New methods often bewilder those who have become used to the old ones; unfamiliar grammatical systems are bewildering to those who think that one system of grammar is common to all the languages of the world. It is disconcerting to face the fact that languages have classical and colloquial grammars existing side by side, which grammars are mutually exclusive in many respects; it is more especially bewildering to those who have never made any study of colloquial language. Easy things and easy systems are more bewildering than difficult ones if one has already become more or less familiar with the difficult system. To those who have wrestled for years with difficult and tangled orthographies a phonetic system of writing, the acme of ease and simplicity, may appear bewilderingly difficult. A good deal of bewilderment may be ascribed to prejudice or to preconceived notions concerning the nature of language; this is why (other things being equal) children are generally less bewildered than adults when learning how to use the spoken form of language; they have fewer prejudices or even none at all.

There are two ways of eliminating bewilderment. One is to give in the clearest possible way certain fundamental explanations whenever there appears to be confusion in the mind of the student; the other is to see that the programme is properly graded. Once the student grasps the scope of the particular problem or series of problems, and once the programme is reasonably well graded, there will be no more bewilderment and there will be no more puzzled learners.

We might perhaps add here that there are times, strangely enough, when the teacher finds it necessary to induce a temporary bewilderment. Categoric and unconventional devices have occasionally to be adopted in order to break certain undesirable associations; ‘mystery words’ and ‘mystery sentences’ often play a useful part in destroying false associations and vicious linguistic habits. But these intentionally created mysteries, puzzling for the time being, are not of the same order as those hopeless and perpetual mysteries which are the cause of so much discouragement and discomfiture.

It is a subject of debate whether we ought to use explanations at all for the purpose of teaching anyone to use a language. Some maintain that we should no more explain a point of theory to a schoolchild or an adult than we should to a child of eighteen months. The young child, it is said, learns to speak the language which he hears around him by dint of sheer imitation; he learns no theory and would understand no explanations; why therefore should we explain at all?

We would suggest that the chief function of explanations is to prevent bewilderment. It may or may not be useful for a schoolchild or an adult to know why certain things are so, why French nouns are either masculine or feminine, why it is sometimes avoir and sometimes être, why we do not say in English he comesn’t, why we do not say I had better to go, and why certain French conjunctions require the use of the subjunctive. Appropriate explanations may induce a more rapid rate of progress or they may not (probably in the long run generally not), but they certainly do have the effect of satisfying that instinctive curiosity which, if unappeased, will induce bewilderment and so cause the student to lose interest.

We might add (although this is not pertinent to the subject under discussion) that in the case of a ‘corrective course’ simple and rational explanations should form an essential part of the treatment.

With regard to the second manner of eliminating the factor of bewilderment, viz. the proper grading of the course, we would refer the reader to the chapter dealing specifically with this subject.