How to teach a foreign language

by Otto Jespersen

With respect to the requirement that the reading must be easy—or rather that there must be gradual progress from easy to difficult—it must be recognized that difficulty may depend upon several different things.

In the first place, the subject-matter may be too difficult; it ought never to be beyond the horizon of the pupils. As previously remarked, in the very beginning, one may even take something simpler than what would otherwise be suitable for persons of that age. But later, on the other hand, the subject-matter ought not to be too light; it is well, as soon as possible, to use matter which really has a permanent value of its own. A large part of the reading will no doubt always be taken from lighter literature, and most of it will not cause any real difficulty as far as the comprehension of the subject-matter is concerned. But in addition to that, there ought surely to be read to a far greater extent than has hitherto been the case in modern language instruction, matter which cannot be understood without some serious thinking, articles on natural science and on human relations in the widest sense of the word, political speeches, etc. Many teachers seem to be afraid to read anything else with their pupils than the most insignificant novel-literature whose contents furnish starvation food. A little friend of mine seven years old once said to his mother: “I like that best which I can scarcely understand.” He thereby expressed the same thought as Dante when he said that man is not happy unless he strains every nerve, or Stuart Mill in his remark: “A pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do never does what he can do.” All instruction must spur the pupil on with problems that are not too easy; in the first stage of instruction in languages, there are problems enough in the purely linguistic difficulties; later on the contents of the reading, too, ought to require some independent powers of assimilation. Sometimes it may even be best to choose selections where the language is very easy, but the matter rather weighty—especially in teaching according to the reform-method, where subject-matter is necessarily assigned a more important part than hitherto, and where even an easy text can in various ways be advantageously employed as a means of training in purely linguistic skill.

Even linguistic easiness or difficulty may depend upon different things. Difficulties in pronunciation ought not to be piled up, a caution applying especially to selections for the very first beginners. Some teachers try to begin with words which may be almost or wholly pronounced with sounds occurring in the native language of the pupils. Aside from the fact that in most cases it only leads to disappointment to exaggerate the resemblance between the foreign and native sounds, this principle may easily lead to slovenliness at a stage when it might involve the most dangerous consequences. The pupil ought from the very first lesson to have the clearest sensation of being on foreign ground, and he ought to realize that the foreign sounds cannot be learned without work. But the difficult sounds ought not to occur too many in succession or in too difficult combinations. It is perhaps best to begin with words of one syllable, but this need not be strictly carried through. I do not, however, attach so much importance to mere difficulties in pronunciation that I would advise an otherwise suitable opening selection in a French reader for beginners to be discarded because it contained such difficult words as manger and chien. It cannot be long, anyway, before the pupils must make acquaintance with, and, what is more, master all the sounds in the language they are about to learn. By difficulties in pronunciation here I mean the real ones, and not such apparent difficulties as are due to freaks of orthography; it is equally troublesome for a German to pronounce English pear and pair; such difficulties as are found in English scarce, fatigue, victuals, French eut, pupille, pitié, balbutier, etc., may be overcome by a panacea which I shall come to later, namely, phonetical transcription.

Furthermore linguistic difficulty may be due to the use of too many new words, and in this respect the best principle at all stages is: as few new words as possible. Every one who has read such pages as often occur in Zola or Daudet, where technical expressions are abundantly piled up, will have had the experience that even with the most careful reading or study it did not take long before all the new words were just as unfamiliar as before the selection was read. Likewise, when one sets to work to learn systematic vocabularies like Plötz’s Vocabulaire Systématique, it requires enormous exertion and a long time to learn them, and it takes an amazingly short time to unlearn them again. But if, in the course of one’s reading, the new words turn up occasionally at relatively large intervals, then the mind is able to absorb the one before the next appears; the intervening passages, which contain only familiar things, manure the soil, as it were, for the new things that are to be sown in it. Ten or twelve new words are more easily and more thoroughly learned when they are scattered over five pages than when they are crowded into ten lines, and then besides there is the benefit to be derived from the recurrence of a number of usual words, to say nothing of sentence-constructions, etc., so that he who has read those five pages has had more opportunity to familiarize himself with the idiosyncrasies of the foreign language than he would have had in ten lines; the apparent waste of time in reading the longer piece has really been profitable, for the capital which had already been acquired in the language has in that time borne interest and compound interest.

Now since it is also better, as we have said, to learn five absolutely necessary words than twenty-five of less importance, it is of course the duty of the editors of text-books in large part to revise the selections which they reprint, so that that which is of linguistic value for the pupils may be cultivated at the expense of everything that is unusual or odd. Texts whose subject-matter is good, but whose language makes them impossible for our purpose, may often be made pedagogically practicable by means of curtailing, paraphrasing, and adaptation in various ways; many popular fairy-tales in the collections of folklorists may be used if one only will take the trouble to translate them from the dialect in which they are written. Such a splendid little story as Mrs. Ewing’s Jackanapes, which is frequently read as it stands in German and Swedish schools, is, according to my judgment, too full of literary expressions and unnecessary words to be easily comprehended by our little pupils. In the passage which I have selected for my own primer, I have therefore in several places made considerable omissions, and the style has throughout been made more colloquial and direct, by means of corrections like these for instance: having ceased to entertain (given up) any hopes of his own recovery. | Tony tumbled off during the first revolution (before he had gone round once). | And what bright eyes peeped out of his dark forelock as it was blown by the wind! (he had!) | told him that he must be on his very best behaviour (behave properly) during the visit. If it had been feasible (possible) to leave off calling him Jackanapes and to get used to his baptismal (real Christian) name of Theodore before the day after to-morrow it would have been satisfactory (she would have done it) | said J., shaking his yellow mop (hair), and leaning back in his one of the two Chippendale armchairs in which they sat (the italicized words left out) | took their early promenade (went out for their walk) earlier than usual | His golden hair flew out, an aureole from which his cheeks shone red and distended with trumpeting (left out). It is very probable that on comparing the original with the revised text, it will be found that some of the colouring has been lost; I merely maintain that the pupils gain thereby. The more it is insisted upon (as according to the reform-method) that the selections are not only to be read but also to be mastered, so that their language becomes the mental property of the pupil, the more necessary is such revision. It is clear that as the pupil progresses, the texts may become more and more literary, and for various reasons the advisability of such curtailing and adaptation becomes more questionable.

As a sample of such revision, I shall reprint a part of an anecdote, (A) as it ought not to be given in a book for beginners (but as it stands in a certain English reader for foreigners) and (B) as it stands in Sweet’s excellent edition:—

(A) His table, however, is constantly set out with a dozen covers, and served by suitable attendants. Who, then, are his privileged guests? No less than a dozen of favourite dogs, who daily partake of my lord’s dinner, seated very gravely in armchairs, each with a napkin round his neck, and a servant behind to attend to his wants. These honourable quadrupeds, as if grateful for such delicate attentions, comport themselves during the repast with a decency which would do more than honour to a party of gentlemen; but if by any chance one of them should, without due consideration, obey his natural instinct, and transgress any of the rules of good manners, his punishment is at hand.

(B) Every day he used to have dinner laid for twelve guests besides himself; but no one was ever invited to the house. Who were the twelve covers laid for then, do you think? For twelve dogs. Each dog had a velvet chair to sit up in, and a napkin round his neck, and a footman behind his chair to wait on him. The older dogs always behaved in the most gentlemanly manner, but it sometimes happened that one of the younger dogs forgot his manners, and snatched a chop or a piece of pudding off the plate of the dog that was sitting next to him.

Finally the difficulties may be grammatical. These are the difficulties that teachers have been most afraid of according to the old methods, so that they have even preferred to give up almost all sense and connection in the subject-matter rather than make a break in the systematical progress in grammar. Such a form as pu was not allowed to occur before the pupils had learned the whole conjugation of pouvoir pouvant pu je peux, etc.; these forms must be learned connectedly, it was said. But the irony of it all is that this “connectedly” means that they are learned out of all connection—and therefore to little profit. When the pupil is required to “understand” the forms which occur in his reader, it will be found on closer examination that this means merely that, for instance, il a is understood by the one who knows that it is 3 pers. sing. pres. of avoir, or who at least knows the formula j’ai, tu as, etc.; that yeux is “understood” by the one who has learned that it is an irregular plural belonging to the singular œil, etc.; in short, to “understand” means here to know where the form in question belongs in the grammatical system; and the forms must be given in exactly the same order in which they are arranged in the grammar, the present before the past tense, etc. But what has the beginner got to do with all this system? The idea is not carried out consistently either, for when all the exercises on accidence have been gone through, it is generally the rule to pass over to connected (unrevised) texts, where such a form as puisse may occur, but the only thing that the pupils get to know about it is that it is subjunctive, for it may easily take a year or two before they learn why the subjunctive is used. Why is syntax less important than accidence? To be quite consistent, it ought no more to be permissible for a syntactical phenomenon than for a form in accidence to occur before the corresponding grammatical section has been learned. But since it seems to be inevitable that we must be inconsistent on some point or other, it is no use beating about the bush; in other words, we must not be afraid of using irregular forms in the very first selection.

Grammatical irregularities, viewed from a pedagogical point of view, fall into two entirely different classes, which are too apt to be treated as if they were co-ordinate. In the first place, all languages contain a number of irregularities which play a most insignificant part both in life and in literature, because they occur so seldom. When the users of the language produce them at long intervals, it is generally with the utmost caution, because they merely have a hazy conception of what the proper form of the expressions ought to be. But they are taken up in the grammars, and as soon as one grammarian has caught sight of one of them, it is carefully copied in all succeeding grammars for the sake of completeness. Foreign grammarians are even more inclined than the natives to pay attention to everything of that kind because they have no instinctive feeling of what is rare and what is common. In some English grammars which are used on the Continent, there may still be found I catched, I digged, I shined, I writ, as the preterite forms of I catch, I dig, I shine, I write; in one, I find given as two different verbs I weet, wit or wot, past tense wot, and I wis, past tense I wist. What a big mistake it is to include such musty and impracticable forms, we can best judge from our own language—but in those French and German grammars which we ourselves write there are things which are just as bad as the above offences in English. When I went to school, I learned the following rule about the plural of travail, “Travail has travails in the plural when it means a report from a minister to the king or from a subordinate official to the minister; likewise when it means a machine to hold unruly horses, while they are being shoed.” This rule is thus criticized by Storm: “Now I must say I have read many hundreds of French books in my day, but so far as I remember, I have never come across travails in modern literature! In the sense of report, it occurs in Mme. de Sévigné. An educated Frenchman, when asked if the word was used with that meaning, answered me that he thought it was no longer used. So one would expect that the word had long ago ceased to have any show in modern grammars, but it seems to be continually creeping in again.”