How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

Oh! je tuerais bien un loup ou un Prussien tout de même.

Et elle montrait du doigt un gros revolver suspendu au-dessus de la cheminée. [La cheminée, c’est là où on fait du feu.]

Son mari s’était engagé dans l’armée [il s’était fait soldat] au commencement de la guerre, et les deux femmes étaient demeurées seules avec le père, le vieux Nicolas Pichon, qui avait refusé de quitter sa demeure pour rentrer en ville [refusé? Si tu dis à Alfred de te prêter son canif, il refuse s’il dit: “Non, je ne veux pas te prêter mon canif.” On avait dit à Pichon d’aller en ville, mais il avait dit: “Non, je ne veux pas quitter ma maison”; donc il avait refusé].

La ville prochaine, c’était Rethel. On y était patriote [vous savez que celui qui aime sa patrie, est nommé patriote]; et les bourgeois [les habitants de la ville] avaient décidé de résister à l’ennemi. Tous—boulangers, épiciers, bouchers, menuisiers, libraires, pharmaciens, manœuvraient à des heures régulières [Tout le monde s’était fait soldats; le boulanger, c’est celui qui vend du pain; l’épicier vend des épices, du thé, du café, du chocolat, et mille autres choses; le menuisier fait des tables et des chaises; le libraire vend des livres; le pharmacien vend tout ce dont on a besoin quand on est malade—donc vous voyez que tous les hommes, de toutes occupations et de toutes classes, allaient manœuvrer tous les jours à une heure fixe] sous les ordres de M. Lavigne, ancien sous-officier de dragons [il n’était plus sous-officier, mais il l’avait été; c’est ce qui est indiqué par le mot ancien], etc., etc.

It is best to go through the lesson for the next time in the beginning of the hour, when both the teacher’s and the pupils’ powers are freshest, and when there is sure to be plenty of time for it; at the end of the hour the teacher may be too hurried and nervous in his anxiety to get through the proper amount before the bell rings. In going through it, the teacher may either let the pupils look at their books or require all books to be closed. The latter is the better way, since then the pupils can give more undivided attention to the teacher; for they must drink in all his words and follow his slightest movements. In that case it is no doubt always best for him to write down on the blackboard each new word as he explains it, and after everything has been explained he may close either by reading the piece aloud himself (without interpolations) or by letting one of the pupils read it. Yet it is not well to follow one method of procedure all the time; and if the piece is easy, so that there are only a few new words, it may immediately be read aloud by one of the pupils (slowly, not in a forced way!), who may stop and ask whenever there is anything that he does not understand. If a sentence contains two or three unfamiliar words or some other difficulty which has given occasion for a question, it must by all means be read again connectedly without interruption as soon as a period has been reached. Finally the teacher can, if it seems necessary, as a further guarantee, let one of the pupils give a free rendering of the contents in his native language; that is a sort of control, at all events until the class has become quite accustomed to having the lesson gone through in this way.

Let me suggest here that, in going through the new lesson, the teacher can also counteract the injury which an unusual order of words or expression occurring in a selection of poetry might do to the pupil’s instinct for the natural language, by giving the prose order of words and explaining it. For instance, the lines: “And everybody in the house On tip-toe has to creep” can first be explained as if they ran: “And everybody in the house has to creep on tip-toe”; again, such an expression as at eve may be altered to in the evening. Then when the pupil sees the changed order of words and the unusual expression in his book, he will understand that they are due to the poetical form. Therefore he will not be tempted to imitate them; if he should do so in later exercises, the teacher must correct him, since there is no earthly reason why the pupil should practise using anything else but everyday language. It is, however, a matter of course that whenever I have used verses in my own books for beginners in English, I have tried to find such as contained very few deviations from the usual form of the language.

VI

We have then come to the following result with respect to translation as a means of interpreting a foreign language to the pupils (p. [56] a): it is not the only and the best means; it ought to be used sparingly; and at all events it is not necessary to translate whole connected pieces, but merely a word or, at the very most, a sentence now and then. But this investigation has already thrown some light upon our next point, namely, translation as a means of testing whether the pupils understand the foreign language (p. [56] b).

Here, too, observation may take the place of translation. The pupil who obeys the teacher’s command, montre-moi la fenêtre, by pointing at the window shows that he understands the word just as well as the one who in answer to the question: what is the meaning of fenêtre? answers, window. Likewise the one who can point to the right thing when the teacher shows him a picture and says; où est le chapeau du garçon? où sont ses souliers? vois-tu le toit de la maison? etc., or the one who carries out a command like prends la craie, lève-toi, assieds-toi, donne-moi ton livre, prends le livre de Jean et donne-le à Henri—especially when he at the same time says: voilà la fenêtre, voilà le chapeau du garçon, voilà la craie, je me lève, etc., with a correct application of the words desired. Nor can there be any doubt that a boy has understood a French question when he can give a sensible answer in the same language, or that he has understood a narrative which has been told or read to him when he can retell it (in English, or still better in French).