How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

Of course the teacher must decide beforehand[29] what points of grammar a certain text is especially fitted to illustrate in this manner. Yet it is not necessary for all the forms which it is desired to group together to occur in the piece which is being examined; if there are any empty spaces in the paradigms, the pupils will of their own accord desire to get them filled out, and they will thus have an opportunity to learn something new. It will also frequently happen that the missing forms are already familiar to the pupils from previous reading; in that case, if the pupils themselves do not happen to think of them, the teacher can easily give them a clue by saying the beginning of the sentence in which they occur.[30]

It follows as a matter of course that only the most elementary things can be so examined in a text of one or two pages that grammatical rules or a tolerably adequate paradigm can be formulated. In dealing with beginners the teacher must not be too ambitious to get, for instance, all the forms of a verb collected in that manner, at all events not all at once; it is not necessary; one tense at a time is quite sufficient. And of course one must not be such a slave of traditional grammatical systems, that one necessarily must go all the way through one class of words before beginning another, etc. There is no reason why these bits of system should not be taken up quite unsystematically, one day a little about pronouns, another day the present tense of verbs, a third day the comparison of adjectives, etc., all according to what comes natural, or what the texts give occasion for.[31] And it will not matter if some time is allowed to pass between these exercises. One of the abominations of the old method of instruction was that the teacher, as a Swedish author has expressed it, considered it his duty on all occasions to feel the grammatical pulse of the pupils.

A teacher in English can, at a rather early stage, set to work in this way to examine and formulate the use of English do as an auxiliary verb. A rather long piece which has been read is assigned to the pupils in parts, so that A and B get the first page, C and D the next, etc., and they are to find and note down all the cases which occur. Then the cases found are gone through in the class in such a way that the teacher first requires all those sentences to be read aloud where do occurs and there is no negation. After some sentences have been read, he may ask what they have in common; if no one answers, more sentences may be taken until someone discovers that all the sentences are interrogative, and then this discovery may be tested in the following sentences. Thereupon the negative sentences which were before omitted are gone through. Is it then necessary to have do in all questions, and in all negative sentences? Well, go through the same pages again for next time and note down all the cases of interrogative and negative sentences where do does not occur. Then in the next lesson we shall finally be able to formulate the rules. This takes longer than to learn the rule in a grammar. Yes, but then we may also be certain that it will be far better understood and remembered, to say nothing of the pleasure it always gives to discover something oneself; it has all of it been a little preliminary practice in scientific methods of research and drawing of conclusions. And then—what I always return to—the whole exercise has also been a review of a number of sentences, and there is not much danger that the pupils will forget the words, turns of expression and grammatical relations which they have become intimate with in this manner.

Even if we do not attain to any results that can stand comparison with the rules in our text-books, yet such lessons in grammatical observation and systematization are none the less valuable. For instance, the last three or four days’ German lesson may be gone through with special attention given to the gender. One pupil reads aloud; every time he comes to a substantive, he mentions one of his class-mates (or the teacher motions to one of them), who is to give the gender,[32] as well as the reasons for his inference (the form of the article in in der kirche, the termination of the adjective in ein schönes mädchen, etc.); one of the boys stands at the blackboard, which is divided into three columns, and writes down each word in the right column, after its gender is determined. When the form or the context does not show the gender, the teacher asks if the word is familiar from previous passages, and if the gender could be seen there; otherwise the teacher will have to say what gender it is. At last (toward the end of the lesson, or when the blackboard is full), all the words are repeated together with the article; then, if it seems fit, the teacher may examine one or another pupil, letting him stand with his back to the blackboard. If there are, for instance, two or three words ending in ung or schaft or some other absolutely certain ending, the pupils may be asked to recall other words with the same ending, and then formulate the rule for themselves. A few hours employed in this manner will surely bear much more fruit than if all the long rules for gender with their exceptions and exceptions to exceptions were committed to memory; the attention is roused and the powers of observation are sharpened, so that the pupils will also in the future take note of the gender of new words, when there is anything to indicate it, especially since it is necessary for them to know the gender of the words which they need in the conversation and transposition exercises already described in this book.

Difficult, especially syntactical, phenomena which do not occur very frequently, cannot be treated exactly in this way, but some of them may be taken up in an analogical manner. During the going over of a large section of the French reader, the attention may, for instance, be directed to the subjunctive, so that each subjunctive form is either written down in a notebook or marked in the margin of the reader; after one or two weeks or so, all these sentences may be collected and arranged in large groups. During the next week, similar cases are frequently met with, and the pupil is given an opportunity to recall his recent observations, and perhaps supplement them by newly discovered varieties of subjunctive clauses, etc. But it must be continually borne in mind that much of what is found in grammars is really of no value except to the philological specialist, and should never be learned by schoolboys.

A systematical grammar is not superfluous except in the first stage. Later on its examples may be used to supplement those collected in the course of the reading; the teacher can, for instance, read them aloud, make sure that they are understood, and use them to help the pupils to find out the rule. Then, when the pupils have formulated the rule as well as they can, it may be read as rendered in the grammar. To go through the grammar from one end to the other, a section at a time, ought not to be undertaken until most of the phenomena have been treated in connexion with the reading; it will then be both easier and more interesting than if taken up earlier; its chief use will then be to fill out and confirm what has already been learned.[33]

If grammar is taught in this way, the pupils will not get that feeling which they now so frequently have, that they are just learning a series of arbitrarily prescribed instructions as to how they are to avoid making mistakes and getting “poor marks” in their written exercises; they are more apt to conceive of it as something to be compared to the laws of nature, those general comprehensive observations of what takes place under certain conditions; for grammar is made up of observations of the manner in which the natives express themselves. The pupils no longer say to themselves: “We must have the subjunctive in purpose clauses for it stands in § 235,” but “we find the subjunctive in all purpose clauses.” The teacher’s chief task is to give the pupils insight into the construction of the foreign language, into its peculiarities and the chief points in which it deviates from other languages. As a rule, text-books dwell too much on details, and often neglect very important features, such as for instance the great freedom allowed in English in the use of substantives as verbs and vice-versâ, the different part played by order of words in the different languages, the cause and effect relationship between a fixed order of words and paucity of case-endings, etc.

The usual arrangement of grammatical material is not as shrewd as it might be. The sharp division between accidence and syntax as we find it in most of our text-books is, from a scientific point of view, untenable and impracticable[34]; from a pedagogical point of view it is unfortunate, because it separates form and function, which ought to be learned together, just as well as a word’s exterior (its sounds and spelling), and its meaning are learned together.[35] And within each of these two parts of the grammar, the usual order of procedure depends upon a meaningless order of precedence between the classes of words, whereby the adverbs are placed about as far as possible from the adjectives, though if there are any two classes of words which ought to belong together, they are these two, which have comparison in common. In the case of the verbs, those things are often grouped together which belong together lexically but not grammatically.[36]