Language learning

“ We have seen that each of us possesses certain spontaneous capacities for learning how to use the spoken form of any language or variety of language. We have seen that these capacities may be either in a latent or an active state. We have seen that unless we enlist these powers in our service we are unlikely to make any real progress in language-study, either in point of quality or quantity. We shall see later by what means we may awaken our latent capacities and cause them to become active, and, incidentally, how we can exercise ourselves to make the fullest use of them. ”

“ What needs, and what opportunities does the student have to be aggressive in making sense out of nonsense--to acquire skills and insights actively rather than having them 'skillfully presented and sufficiently drilled' into him? Active inquiry, even when it is not conscious, may result in active learning (Kuno, 1969) . Here is the value, for some students at least, of the inductive presentation of grammar so dear to some A-L practitioners, and also of direct, monolingual teaching of meanings for words and sentences. ”

“ He said (p. 49) that 'a student learns grammar not by attempting to say everything that he will eventually want to say, but by familiarizing himself with structure patterns from which he can generalize, applying them to whatever linguistic needs he may have in the future.' 'The single paramount fact about language learning is that it concerns . . . the formation and performance of habits' (p. 47) . The teacher should learn how to 'teach the use of structure through pattern practice' (p. 139) , but 'structure is [also] learned in the form of dialogues based upon living situations' (p. 123) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many other patterns of human interaction, which prompt practical action for change, are deeply seated in language. Watching our children, upon whom we impose literacy, grow, we almost always count the words they learn and evaluate their progress in articulating desires, opinions, and questions. What we neglect to ask is what kind of world does language bring to them in the process of learning language? What kind of practical experiences does language make possible? When children break loose of our language, it is almost too late to understand the problem. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the very start it would be possible to prevent certain common errors and confusions, that tend to become engrained in juvenile minds by the fluctuating or contradictory usage of their own language, to their great let and hindrance in the subsequent stages of language-learning. ”

“ A child learning to speak is learning habits and associations which are just as much determined by the environment as the habit of expecting dogs to bark and cocks to crow. The community that speaks a language has learnt it, and modified it by processes almost all of which are not deliberate, but the results of causes operating according to more or less ascertainable laws. If we trace any Indo-European language back far enough, we arrive hypothetically (at any rate according to some authorities) at the stage when language consisted only of the roots out of which subsequent words have grown. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, in actual fact, human learning is rendered easier, though psychologically more complex, through language; but at bottom language does not alter the essential character of learning, or of the part played by instinct in promoting learning. Language, however, is a subject upon which I do not wish to speak until a later lecture. ”

“ Some wish to possess an ‘understanding’ knowledge only, while others are content merely to make themselves understood.
The student may limit his requirements to a very superficial knowledge of some pidgin form of the language, and will be perfectly happy if he just succeeds in making himself understood by using some atrocious caricature of the language which he is supposed to be learning. Or he may be more ambitious and set out in earnest to become master of the living language just as it is spoken and written by the natives themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We read very slowly when the language is imperfectly mastered, and we need the dictionary, whereas in the native tongue we see the whole page almost at a glance, as if it were a picture. People whose time for reading is limited ought not to waste it in grammars and dictionaries, 193 but to confine themselves resolutely to a couple of languages, or three at the very utmost, notwithstanding the contempt of polyglots, who estimate your learning by the variety of your tongues. ”

“ But, whether for the purpose of finding out which was the primitive language of mankind, or of discovering how far language was natural to man, the experiments failed to throw any light on the problem before us. Children, in learning to speak, do not invent language. ”

“ He had taught himself a language down here,—if only to know it by sight, and to have formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation, could be called learning it. ”

“ but it is plain he had reading at least, if they will not call it learning. Nor is it any greatmatter, if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or from another. ”

“ The conclusion which appears to me to be established beyond all possibility of doubt, both by the positive evidence of the value of a grammar-school training and by the negative evidence of the difficulty which attends the acquisition of foreign languages in adult or even adolescent life, is that training in language is of the essence of education in early years. It is of the essence of education in early years because it is only then that it is effective; and, further, because training in expression means giving precision to thought. ”

“ As regards the living languages, students leave the lyceum, for the most part, without having attained any of the objects of study. They are persuaded that they have nothing to learn, when they know by heart all the rules of grammar, have written all the themes they contain, and learned a volume of dialogues; when they commence to translate fluently, to read aloud good or bad, and to make correctly grammatical and logical analyses. However, nothing of all this is really the practice of language. ”

“ It is a serious question whether students can ever acquire a mastery of a language, or even a sufficient knowledge of it really to appreciate its literature, unless they learn to use this language to express their own thoughts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The arts of speaking and writing are acquired without difficulty, if, conforming to the laws of Nature, pupils read and listen beforehand, and always associate the idea with the word. When they perfectly understand the spoken language, the professor can address his class in it, so that each lesson will be, for all, an advance toward the desired end. To listen, and understand what is said, is to learn to pronounce and to talk. Later, the book first used in reading and listening will teach, by imitation, the arts of speaking and writing. ”

“ Exercises in modern languages should be vehicles of thought without the intervention of the national idiom, and they should be so familiar as to become, through reading and hearing, sources of natural instruction.
The complete knowledge of a language includes four distinct arts—reading, hearing, speaking, writing. In an ancient language we need only the first of these arts. Its study should have no aim but that of giving the pupils the ability to read the classical authors, and appreciate the charm of their compositions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mastery of the language, moreover of the language code, as part of the practical experience it facilitates, does not come from studying English in high school or college, rather from decoding the narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose of this writing is knowledge about writing and reading. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any person unacquainted with either of the above languages, can, with the aid of these works, be enabled to read, write and speak the language of either, without the aid of a teacher or any oral instruction whatever, provided they pay strict attention to the instructions laid down in each book, and that nothing shall be passed over, without a thorough investigation of the subject it involves: by doing which they will be able to speak, read or write either language, at their will and pleasure. ”

“ And if it is necessary for them to learn so many English words, of course the most difficult, by reason of having nothing in their language to explain them, why not learn the other half, easy to be learned, because they have corresponding words in their own language that will explain them, & then they are introduced at once into an inexhausible fountain of religious & scientific reading. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All school studies, moreover, deal with language, the embodiment of the reason, not of the individual, but of the Anglo-Saxon stock or people. The most elementary language study begins by isolating the words of a sentence, and making the pupil conscious of their separate articulation, spelling, and meaning. The savage does not quite arrive at a consciousness of the separate words of the language, but knows only whole sentences. ”

“ Those who have mastered the literature very easily learn the rest. Those who are familiar with the literature of a foreign language, write it, even with the mistakes they make, better than the person who has put together a perfectly correct composition according to grammatical rules. After the child, in his language study, has made enough progress to understand a fairly [Pg 270] easy book, he ought to work through one book after another, with the help of a dictionary and explain in his own language extempore what he reads. ”