How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

And since I now seem to be in the mood for quotations, I can also refer to Goethe’s words: “Thus I had learned Latin, just like German, French, English, only through practice, without rule and without system. Anyone who knows what the state of school instruction was at that time will not find it strange that I neglected the grammar as well as the rhetoric; everything seemed to come naturally to me. I retained the words, their formations and transformations in my ear and in my mind, and I employed the language with ease for writing and talking.”[27]

In giving the pupil English sentences to translate into the foreign language, we are only artificially creating difficulties. If it is difficult for the pupil to translate into his mother-tongue where at least confirmed habit ought to prevent him from falling into the worst pitfalls, then it must be much more difficult, indeed impossible, to translate into a foreign language where he is not yet quite at home. We ourselves lead the pupil to make mistakes, and then we have to do all we can to prevent his confronting us with a too overwhelming number of them. To this end we limit each exercise to illustrating one, or two, or three, paragraphs in the grammar; we make theoretical rules to serve as a guide in translating, without always remembering how difficult it is to make practical use of such rules; we bracket the words which are not to be translated; we try to be helpful by placing alongside of, or underneath, the correct English, some very strange English indeed, which, however, has the advantage that it can be translated literally, etc., etc. And the result of all this exertion? Well, it is a well known fact that they are not always things of beauty that we meet with in the French exercises which are handed in after many years of toil, according to this method. Experience is sure to teach us that this is not the means to our end. Joh. Storm is right when he says (Franske taleövelser, Preface): “The worst and most unfruitful torment in the school instruction of the present time is the excessive use of written exercises in foreign languages.” As a bright contrast to this “constructive” method of procedure, we have the “imitative” method, which may be so called partly because it is an imitation of the way in which a child learns his native language, partly because it depends upon that invaluable faculty, the natural imitative instinct of the pupils, to give them the proper linguistic feeling, if it only has ample opportunity to come into play. As a motto for this method, we might perhaps say: Away with lists and rules. Practise what is right again and again!

IX

“But our pupils must not only know their foreign languages unconsciously and mechanically; they must not only learn how to express themselves, but they must also know why.” When I think of the instruction in grammar that has been usual hitherto, I am tempted to say as if in echo, “Why?”

In a school in Copenhagen, the story goes that a certain teacher after having asked about the gender of the French substantive mort and then “Why?” got the answer, “Because it comes from Latin mors, which is feminine”; he was not satisfied with that, however, but made the correction: “No, it is because it is an exception.” When we feel scandalized at this teacher’s stupidity, we ought conscientiously to ask ourselves if many of the answers given to the question “Why?” in grammar teaching are in reality much more valuable than this one; the object in most cases is merely to classify the sentences or words under certain given rubrics and to give their names and the respective rules which have been committed to memory, something which can in large part be done with very little real grammatical understanding of the language in question.

The usual superstition that theoretical instruction in grammar is the best way to teach pupils how to express themselves grammatically is of a piece with the severity with which grammatical mistakes are criticized in comparison with the mildness with which mistakes of vocabulary, etc., are treated.

That grammatical propositions are abstractions, which are often difficult even for experts to understand, and which must therefore be far beyond the horizon of our pupils, we see from the way in which most philologists, on coming across a rule which is the least bit involved, immediately have to resort to the examples to see what the point is; we also see it from the difficulty which grammarians often find in expressing their rules in such a way as to be really clear. Therefore there is even among persons who have to any extent studied languages theoretically (and perhaps most among them) a great tendency to avoid as much as possible the traditional, grammatical, theoretical method when they want to take up a new language; this feeling has been clearly expressed by the renowned Romance scholar H. Schuchardt.[28] It is true, as has been said, that one really cannot begin to learn the grammar of a language until one knows the language itself.

In contrast to our school-days, when in all subjects a ready-made system was pounded into us, and it was only through the system that we caught sight of some of the facts upon which it was built, so that we indulged in only extremely little of anything like independent observation or classification of observations, in contrast to all this, another method of procedure is coming to the front in all teaching, a method which starts out from the things which the child itself can see in its surroundings, a method which trains the child to observe, to classify its observations, to draw its own conclusions, so that finally, when the time is ripe, the scientific system will raise itself, as it were, in a natural way on the foundation of the observations made. The golden rule is: “Never tell the children anything that they can find out for themselves.”

Theoretical grammar ought not to be taken up too early, and when it is taken up it is not well to do it in such a way that the pupil is given ready-made paradigms and rules. After the manner of Spencer’s “Inventional Geometry,” where the pupil is all the way through led to find out the propositions and proofs for himself, we ought to get an Inventional Grammar. When a selection in the reader has been read, the pupils may be asked to go through it again (read it aloud), and pay special attention, for instance, to the personal pronouns; every time one occurs, it is to be written down on the blackboard; there the forms are finally classified (by the pupils!) according to the natural associations between them, and thus the paradigms are constructed quite naturally; then, if desired, the pupils can copy them down in special note-books for future reference. For instance, if the French possessive pronoun is found in the two forms son and sa, in the combinations sa main, son gant, son épée, son ennemi, sa figure, sa blessure, son opinion, the object of the pupils must be to discover the principle of usage. It will not be found difficult to formulate a rule in these cases; but, if necessary, the teacher can help the pupils not a little by means of the emphasis with which he reads the sentences in which the forms are found. Then the rule once formulated may be tested on other forms to see if the same principle of usage should happen to apply there too, etc.