Language acquisition

“ We have hitherto considered what elements of the language may be referred to a child’s first acquisition of language. But we have not yet done with the part which children play in [179] linguistic development. There are two things which must be sharply distinguished from the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapter—the first, that grown-up people in many cases catch up the words and forms used by children and thereby give them a power of survival which they would not have otherwise; the second, that grown-up people alter their own language so as to meet children half-way. ”

“ Among peoples not actually subject to British or American rule, and who are neither waiters nor commercial travellers, the inducements to learn English, rather than French or German, do not increase. If our initial assumptions are right, the decisive factor in this matter is the amount of science and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the man who learns it. ”

“ I am a trained teacher and a student of pedagogic science, and I am a watchful parent; I know how time and opportunity are wasted in school, and particularly in language teaching. Languages are not things that exist in water-tight compartments; each one illuminates the other and—unless it is taught with stupefying stupidity—leads on to others. A child can acquire the polyglot habit almost unawares. This widening grasp of languages is or was within the capacity of nearly everyone born into the world—given the facilities. ”

“ But if the learner is indeed to be at the center of deliberate language transfer, we must no longer look at him only as 'linguistic man'--man regarded only as a potential internalizer and producer of alien sounds, words and patterns. Any language student is an entire social being, who inhabits (or consists of) an entire physical organism. ”

“ So let him get on with Mathematics and the Classics, for that is what he will gain Honours on (if any) and not the German language: that is merely an accomplishment.{83}”
Foreign languages ought to be begun in nurseries, and not left for schools: all good linguists have begun by learning words in different languages as soon as they could speak. ”

“ In the first chapter we have seen that each of us, child or adult, possesses in either an active or a latent state certain capacities for the spontaneous assimilation of the spoken and colloquial form of any given language, native or foreign. In the case of the young child, these capacities are in an active state and at his immediate service, he does not require to be trained in their use; in the case of the average adult, these capacities are in a latent state, they have fallen into disuse, they are not at his immediate service, he must train himself to use them, he must learn how to learn. ”

“ Further, we must remember that the child has far more abundant opportunities of hearing his mother-tongue than one gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right syntax: the language comes to him as a fresh, ever-bubbling spring. ”

“ There are, in addition, non-linguistic 'behaviors' which are totally indispensable for linguistic success: willingness to phonate, feeling that one has something worth phonating about, expectation that the language can be useful--these and many others deserve conscious and systematic encouragement from the teacher at least as much as gender agreement or sequence of tenses do. ”

“ By use the child acquires one of these different forms, and it is the only language he retains till the age of reason. To acquire two languages he must be able to compare their ideas, and how can he compare ideas he can barely understand? Everything may have a thousand meanings to him, but each idea can only have one form, so he can only learn one language. ”

“ We readily plead guilty to a firm insistence on habit-forming exercises and drills, but continue to urge in mitigation that the practical study of language, the mastery of any form of actual speech, is a habit-forming process and little else. We must have the courage and honesty to face facts as we find them: a language cannot be mastered by learning interesting things about that language, but only by assimilating the material of which that language is made up. ”

“ But there is another class of literature, that collected by folklorists, which is orally transmitted from generation to generation, and which shows its vigour by being continually amusing and by continually shooting new shoots. Much of it can successfully be used in teaching languages; and that which amuses a French child of five or six years may often amuse an English child of ten or eleven or even more, because in the foreign [27] language it gets the charm that always is connected with the unknown. ”

“ If we compel a student to utter foreign words before he has learnt how to make the requisite foreign sounds, if we compel him to write a composition in a foreign language before he has become reasonably proficient in sentence-building, or if we compel him to talk to us in the foreign language before he has done the necessary drill-work, we are compelling him to use the pidgin form of the language. ”

“ Pupils who study alone are limited to written language, but with a master the spoken language may be entered upon by means of exercises in listening. By attention to the reading of the master, the art of understanding foreign speech is acquired even more rapidly than the art of reading ”

“ If the [122] student has not been put through a proper course of drill-work, all his efforts at free work will be based on that most unnatural and vicious of processes—conventional translation from the mother-tongue. The undrilled French student will be speaking and writing not English as we understand the term, but anglicized French. Having formed no English language habits, he will cast all his thoughts in the French mould, and when the exact English equivalents to his French words and phrases are missing he will break down. ”

“ In this way all that part of language-study which tends to be dead weight in teaching the young is got rid of in one fell swoop, and this though the language taught and learnt is a highly developed instrument for reading, writing, speaking, and literary expression. ”

“ In the vernacular, we pass from hearing to reading. It is spoken language, the first manifestation of our thought, which gives us the key to written language. In the same way, but in an inverse order, those who learn a language in books should often hear the written text, to familiarize themselves with the pronunciation and to recognize the written words in the spoken words. Their progress in understanding the spoken language will be much more rapid, if they comprehend the written language without translating it. ”

“ No reasonable doubt remains: we are all endowed by nature with certain capacities which enable each of us, without the exercise of our powers of study, to assimilate and to use the spoken form of any colloquial language, whether native or foreign. We may avail ourselves of these powers by training ourselves deliberately to utilize them, or, having more confidence in our studial efforts, or for some reason of special expediency, we may choose to leave our spontaneous capacities in their latent state and make no use of them. ”

“ When the pupil is sufficiently advanced in English to justify the teacher in taking up any of the Special Subjects, does he, for instance, while teaching Latin or Greek, French or German, begin by throwing aside the knowledge of English already acquired by his pupil, and commence to teach these foreign languages in the same way adopted by him in teaching the child English—a language quite as foreign to him as Latin or Greek, French or German? ”

“ But if the talks are used for interpreting the text, two big birds are killed with one stone, and then it will soon be seen that skill in speaking increases like wealth; if you have only reached a certain point, the rest comes of its own accord; the accumulated capital multiplies surprisingly fast and willingly.
The pupils must write—original papers in the foreign language, not translations—that is, the form of language used must be as little as possible suggested by English turns of expression. ”

“ The early training in, at least, two languages will also enable the inquirer to discriminate between the substance of a fact or thought, if he might use such a term, and the sound that represents it, for, if he has only studied his own language early in life, he will never be able to emancipate himself completely from the confusion which is naturally engendered between the idea and his special manner of expressing it. ”

“ My progress was encouraging, and after a few weeks it happened sometimes that my teacher returned my paper to me with the assurance that she found nothing in it to correct.
This way of learning a foreign language proved no less effective than agreeable. One may begin the attempts of free expression, and thus an independent use of the language, with a comparatively small vocabulary. Conscientious reading and well-conducted conversations will then quickly enlarge the vocabulary and develop the facility of expression. ”

“ Grammar, exercises, reading aloud, and mnemonic lessons, mere word-practice—the sole resource in teaching to write and speak a foreign language—do not help in the least in learning to read and understand it, nor even in learning to speak and write it, for lack of imitation, by which means alone these arts are acquired. ”

“ But the art of reading by free translation presents inestimable advantages, which cannot be obtained from any other branch of instruction, nor from a language of which only the first elements are known. Being able to enter into the spirit of the foreign text, the student easily seizes the relation between thought and its expression, and the analysis of the expression, needed to render it into French, becomes an intellectual exercise, which brings to his knowledge the genius of two languages and two peoples. ”

“ More than courses in French, Spanish, German or English, a course in a seldom-taught language is likely to be the brain child of one author, conceived in desperation, brought forth in obscurity, and destined to be despised and rejected of all other men. ”

“ No doubt where the languages are essentially distinct, based on radically different conceptions of the sentence and its parts, even the desire of imitation will be often not strong enough to cause the one language to be borrowed by the speakers of the other. Here and there we come across children who have a difficulty in imitating the pronunciation or use of the words they hear, and such a difficulty is a main cause of the origination of dialects ”

“ Some few exercises in artistic translation, which the teacher carefully goes through with them, will help to give the more advanced pupils a vivid perception of some of the most delicate shades of variation in the languages as means of expression for human thought—but as the daily bread of language instruction that kind of exercise is not to be recommended, especially not for beginners. ”

“ Inquire in each case how the person acquired his knowledge, and you will find that he acquired it by methods making no call on his capacities for reasoning, for concentrating, for analysing, or for theorizing. Instead of selecting and adapting previously acquired habits connected with his first language, he was able to form new habits.
To sum up our inquiry, we find that there are people who have been able to use their spontaneous capacities of assimilation in order to acquire a second or a third language; we find that young children nearly always do so, that certain adults sometimes do so. ”

“ To replace this method by something less cruel is the function of such things as guides, teachers, and pedagogic devices. For let us remark that the environment of the young child who acquires language spontaneously, as explained in Chapter I, is such that error has little or no chance of surviving; the persons with whom he is in contact are providing him continually with accurate models of whatever the dialect may happen to be; he is given no chance of imitating wrong models, and he is not intelligent enough to create them himself in any appreciable degree. ”

“ The most usual phraseology for describing the indirect benefit of languages is, that they supply a training to the powers of the mind; that, if not information, they are culture; that they re-act upon our mastery of our own language, and so on. It is quite necessary, however, to find phrases more definite and tangible than the slippery words "culture" and "training": we must know precisely what particular powers or aptitudes are increased by the study of a foreign language. ”

“ Each passing year sees more people exposed to more languages. The largest number are learning widely taught international languages such as English and French. Smaller, but growing even more rapidly, is the number of people who need competence in one or more of the seldom-taught languages of the world. ”

“ That this may be a good way to make a beginning in comparative philology scarcely needs further proof; many things belonging to this field of study can be understood by our advanced pupils, and ought to belong to a good general education. Everyone who has received a little more than the most ordinary school education ought to understand what is meant by the relationship and development of languages; he ought to be acquainted with such linguistic phenomena as the loss of sounds, assimilation, analogical formations, differentiations, etc. ”