How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

Perhaps it is worth while here to consider the four ways in which it is possible to communicate the material of a foreign language to pupils. Either (1) the teacher may not let them use any writing at all, but give them everything orally; or (2) he may give them the orthography alone; or (3) he may give them orthography and phonetical transcription together; or finally (4) he may give them phonetical transcription alone.

(1) The first way obviously has the advantage that there is no sound-symbol whatever to confuse the clear apprehension of the pupils; it resembles the manner in which a child learns its mother tongue. It will also be the more in place the more the instruction can be brought to resemble the way in which a child first acquires language, that is, where there is only one pupil, or at least very few; where the pupil (pupils) is (are) not very old, and especially not yet quite familiar with the secrets of writing; where the teacher is a native; and above all, where there is ample time. For we must not shut our eyes to the fact that this exclusively oral instruction in languages takes exceedingly much time; much repetition is necessary, and the teacher has to have great patience. In schools it is only possible to have purely oral instruction as a short preliminary course of a couple of months at the most, before passing over to the use of writing in some form or other. Walter, who has tried both, is emphatically of the opinion that in class instruction phonetical transcription is much to be preferred to purely oral instruction, because the latter wastes an enormous amount of time, and the teacher cannot feel nearly so sure that the whole class is able to follow.

(2) The pupils are immediately allowed to see the traditional orthography, and the teacher gives them the pronunciation orally. The eternal repetition and the painful small corrections which this method craves make the lessons bothersome for both the teacher and the pupils, who almost always become slovenly out of sheer discouragement over the prodigious task before them. Of course there are some rules for the relations between orthography and pronunciation, but unfortunately there are so few without exceptions that certainty cannot be attained by their means.

(3) The pupils are taught the traditional spelling from the very beginning, but at the same time they are given an antidote in the shape of phonetical transcription, either in the form that every new word is phonetically transcribed in the glossary, or that (in addition) the reading selections themselves are transcribed. To be sure the advantages of phonetical transcription are made use of by this method; several teachers have expressed their satisfaction at the results thus obtained, and I have no doubt that they are better than when phonetical transcription is dispensed with. However, I am convinced that by this method it is difficult sometimes to prevent the less intelligent pupils from confusing the two systems of spelling, so that they neither learn the pronunciation nor the orthography very well.

(4) Therefore I have always (like the majority of the advocates of phonetical transcription) preferred to let beginners be employed only with phonetical transcription for some time, so that they may become quite familiar not only with the system of sound-symbols, but also with a good deal of the material of the language before they pass on to seeing the words in their orthographical shape too. The principle to be followed here is that of not allowing the difficulties to pile up, but overcoming them one by one. When the pupils know the symbols after the first few lessons, it causes them no difficulty whatever to read the texts; these themselves (together with the meaning of the words, the grammatical forms, etc.) are therefore far more easy to learn than if the caprices of the orthography had to be mastered at the same time.

For this method, connected texts in phonetical transcription are of course necessary, but such texts are also to be recommended to those who follow method No. 3, since there are many points of pronunciation which cannot come up at all in the transcriptions of the single words in the glossary, such points as appear only in combinations of words, in connected discourse. There is, for instance, French [ə] in le, de, demande, devenir, quatre, etc., etc., which is sometimes pronounced and sometimes omitted, according to the number of consonants coming immediately before or after the [ə]: à devenir [advəni·r], pour devenir [purdəvni·r], etc.; there is the varying treatment of the English r; there are double forms due to the influence of sentence-stress, such as [kæn] and [kən] (= can), and many other phenomena of that kind, which it is really necessary to pay attention to, since no sentence can be pronounced naturally without consideration for these points, and since we cannot understand the natives without being familiar with them[50]—for we cannot require the French to make their language stiff and do violence to all their natural habits of speech to suit us. Only by using connected texts in phonetical transcription can the teacher require the pupils from the very beginning to read the foreign language connectedly, intelligently, and with some expression.

In conversations on the subject, I have so often had to answer the question as to whether I also want the pupils to learn to write phonetical transcription, that I must devote a few lines to that question here too. Of course they must write phonetical transcription, but learn it—well, that is scarcely necessary, for it will not entail the least bit of extra work or trouble for them. They learn the symbols, and when they know them they can write any word whatever in phonetical transcription, if they only know how to pronounce it; this is a thing which follows of its own accord from the very nature of phonetical transcription. Dictation, in which the pupils are to write in phonetical transcription what the teacher says to them, presupposes only a correct apprehension of the sounds, and is a very good test as to whether they have heard accurately (cf. p. [95]).

How long is a teacher to continue to use exclusively phonetical transcription? That is one of the most difficult questions, and I cannot venture to give a decided answer. The answer will surely always depend partly upon the age and maturity of the pupils and upon how much time can be spent upon the language on the whole. I myself have even dared to go so far that in teaching a class in English, when I only had two hours a week for two years before the final examination, I spent the whole of the first year on phonetical transcription (Sweet’s Elementarbuch), and I did not regret it. In French in the lower classes, I once at least used phonetical transcription more than a year, and the only difficulty arose when some boys came in in the course of the year from other schools. At other times, again, I have made the course in phonetical transcription shorter, and on the whole I have experimented in various ways without coming to any certain result—except this: continue with phonetical transcription as long as possible. For there is relatively so much more of the language itself learned in this way, that I have not the slightest doubt that the pupil who, with the same number of lessons a week, and at the same age, has read phonetical transcription for two years and orthography for half a year knows more of the language (not only of the pronunciation!) than the pupil who has used phonetical transcription for half a year and thereupon orthography for two and a half years (in all half a year more than the first boy). And then the phonetical transcription itself is such a fine means of training the pupils to minute exactness, because they really have to be constantly on the lookout in order to read neither more nor less than each symbol indicates; therefore I attach great educational significance to phonetical transcription.

But of course we have to begin to learn the orthography some time; and I suppose it is this transition more than anything else that has frightened people away from using phonetical transcription, because they imagine that it must be extremely difficult. But now all those who have dared to try phonetical transcription unanimously declare that they were surprised at the ease with which the transition took place; there was no trouble worth mentioning either for the teacher or the pupils; and they were surprised at the accuracy in orthography displayed by pupils who had been taught in this way. The psychological reason for this is probably to be found in the sharper perception which these pupils necessarily get of the difference between sound and writing, together with the fact that they are not compelled like the others to learn many things at a time (spelling, pronunciation, meaning, inflection), but the orthography is separated out as something which is to be learned by itself about words with whose pronunciation and meaning they have already become quite familiar.