On Learning Modern Languages

Abstract

SOME instructors of modern foreign languages are sure that maximum virtue resides in an approach. They would use the foreign language, even for grammatical explanations, as the language of the classroom. Among them there are degrees of stringency in applying the prescription, some allowing occasional lapses into English to appease the backward, others, rasher, granting no concessions to ignorance or unpreparedness. The more fanatic oral-aural practitioners are mainly the native-born German, Spanish, etc., in our schools, whose language departments they have in many places practically taken over, and American-born instructors who have studied for comparatively long periods in a single foreign country. Another group of instructors (to which I belong) is of opinion that talking a language is the spire of the edifice, so to speak. They feel that, while many can acquire ability in school to read acceptably in a foreign language, given a sufficient conditioning training in English, nearly all of those who begin a foreign language with the thought of very soon using it in the same manner as their own are doomed to disappointment, and quit its study without residual impressions that might inspire love of the foreign language and its literature. This group of instructors has particularly upon its conscience the fact that language and literature are inseparable concepts; that linguistic art is very long indeed, and extremely various, so much so that the student must proceed with attention fixed equally on all the processes involved. Such teachers are, in other words, against a segmentation of processes as ultimately unproductive. Many of the first group have undoubtedly the ideas of group two as regards end-results. Assuming indifference to bandwagons (the present endorsement of the lay public and educational prescribers, themselves generally without foreign-language experience) they are as sincerely lovers of the foreign language and literature (though probably not of English) as the fourfold-emphasis propagandists of the second group. For a third united (and well united) band there are the linguistic scientists, or linguisticians, resoundingly introduced some years ago to a gullible public by Fortune and The Reader's Digest. They were headed by the redoubtable Professor Leonard Bloomfield, master of a certain abstruse art of describing and analyzing language. Already thirty-five years ago this methodist was demanding a new scientific concentration upon the child studying foreign language in the grades. The devoted victim should have, according to the professor, a minimum of at least eight hours a week of the teacher's personal ministration, or then and there give up hope of satisfactory learning of a foreign language.