sing's Emilia Galotti and prose writings (say extracts from the Hamburgische Dramaturgie or Laokoon); Scheffel's Ekkehard; Schiller's Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Braut von Messina, and historical prose (say the third book of the Geschichte des dreiszigjährigen Krieges); Sudermann's Johannes; Tieck's Genoveva; Wildenbruch's Heinrich.

A good selection from this list would be: (1) A recent novel, such as Ekkehard or Soll und Haben, read not in its entirety, but in extracts sufficient to give a good idea of the plot, the style, and the characters; (2) Egmont or Götz; (3) a short course of reading in Goethe's prose (say the Sesenheim episode from Dichtung und Wahrheit); (4) Wallenstein's Lager and Wallenstein's Tod, with the third book of the Thirty Years' War; (5) Emilia Galotti; (6) a romantic drama, such as Genoveva or Der Prinz von Homburg. It is assumed that by the time the fourth year is reached, if the preceding instruction has been what it should be, translation in class can be largely dispensed with and the works read somewhat rapidly. Of course they can not be thoroughly studied, but thorough literary study belongs to the college or the university. It is not sound doctrine for the secondary school that one work studied with the painstaking thoroughness of the professional scholar is worth half a dozen read rapidly. In the secondary school the aim should be to learn to read easily, rapidly, and yet with intelligent, general appreciation, somewhat as an ordinary educated American reads Shakespeare. Such a person in reading Shakespeare will find much that he does not fully understand, archaic phrases, obscure allusions, etc. If he were to work out all these things in the manner of a scholar, and go deeply into the literary, historical, and psychological questions involved in a single one of Shakespeare's great plays, it would take a very long time. Nevertheless, he can read the play intelligently in a few hours. An editor's note helps him quickly over the graver difficulties, and when he is done he has a good general idea of the work, and has been greatly profited by the reading of it.

The other lines of work suggested for the advanced course appear to require no further comment. They explain themselves, and grow naturally out of what has gone before.

SECTION X.-THE ELEMENTARY COURSE IN FRENCH.

(a) THE AIM OF THE INSTRUCTION.

At the end of the elementary course the pupil should be able to pronounce French accurately, to read at sight easy French prose, to put into French simple English sentences taken from the language of everyday life, or based upon a portion of the French text read. and to answer questions on the rudiments of the grammar as defined below.

(b) THE WORK TO BE DONE.

During the first year the work should comprise. (1) Careful drill in pronunciation; (2) the rudiments of grammar, including the inflection of the regular and the more common irregular verbs, the plural of nouns, the inflection of adjectives, participles, and pronouns; the use of personal pronouns, common adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions; the order of words in the sentence, and the elementary rules of syntax; (3) abundant easy exercises, designed not only to fix in the memory the forms and principles of grammar, but also to cultivate readiness in the reproduction of natural forms of expression; (4) the reading of from 100 to 175 duodecimo pages of graduated texts, with constant practice in translating into French easy variations of the sentences read (the teacher giving the English), and in reproducing from memory sentences previously read; (5) writing French from dictation.

During the second year the work should comprise: (1) The reading of from 250 to 400 pages of easy modern prose in the form of stories, plays, or historical or biographical sketches; (2) constant practice, as in the previous year, in translating into French easy variations upon the texts read; (3) frequent abstracts, sometimes oral and sometimes written, of portions of the text already read; (4) writing French from dictation; (5) continued drill upon the rudiments of grammar, with constant application in the construction of sentences; (6) mastery of the forms and use of pronouns, pronominal adjectives, of all but the rare irregular verb forms, and of the simpler uses of the conditional and subjunctive.

Suitable texts for the second year are: About's Le roi des montagnes, Bruno's Le tour de la France, Daudet's easier short tales, De la Bédollière's La Mère Michel et son chat, Erckmann-Chatrian's stories, Foa's Contes biographiques and Le petit Robinson de Paris, Foncin's Le pays de France, Labiche and Martin's La poudre aux yeux and Le voyage de M. Perrichon, Legouvé and Labiche's La cigale chez les fourmis, Malot's Sans famille, Mairet's La tâche du petit Pierre, Merimée's Colomba, extracts from Michelet, Sarcey's Le siège de Paris, Verne's stories.

(c) SUGGESTIONS TO THE TEACHER.

The suggestions already offered upon the teaching of elementary German are, in the main, equally applicable to the teaching of elementary French. While each language has its own peculiar difficulties that require special attention from the teacher, the general principles that should regulate the work are the same for both. To avoid needless repetition we refer the reader back to what is said in Section VII, c, and content ourselves here with adding a few further observations which may be regarded as supplementary.

The educational value of the study of French in cultivating habits of careful discrimination, of mental alertness, of clear statement, must never be lost from view, and the expediency of an exercise must often be determined by its utility in attaining these ends. The knowledge gained in the secondary school alone can rarely be of immediate commercial value, but it should be a most serviceable foundation for later acquirements, and the advocates of oral methods may fairly lay some stress on this consideration. The demand for more spoken French in the class room rests chiefly, however, on other grounds, which may be summarized as follows:

(1) Tongue and ear are most efficient aids to the memory, and he who depends on eye alone deprives himself of indispensable allies.

(2) Oral work gives vivacity to the class, stimulates the pupil by active participation, and encourages him by making him feel that he is gaining a practical command of the language.

(3) In reproducing French sentences several can be spoken in the time needed to write one.

(4) The hearer is compelled to grasp the sentence as a whole, while the reader is apt to dwell on separate words, distorting and often reversing the sense, which can only be obtained by making the sentence the unit of thought and interpreting each word in the light of its relation to its fellows.

(5) The rapidity of speech also conduces to grasping thought directly from the French with no intermediate English. Many readers really read only the English into which, more or less laboriously, they change the French words. It is needless to dwell on the fact that such readers get their entire thought from a translation, usually a very bad one, and can never have any exact perception of literary excellence in French nor distinguish shades of meaning different from those to which they have been accustomed in English. It is hard to see how such a one can have any vivid conception of a lyric, an oration, or a dialogue; nor can he understand how, when translation is required, the proper order is French-thought-English, and not French-English, with the thought last or never.

On the other hand, that time may be economically used, rambling, aimless talking must not be tolerated in the class room; and a teacher who does not possess a good pronunciation and a ready command of the language generally does far more harm than good by practising on his pupils. Whatever recommendations the committee has made as to oral work apply only to those teachers who can speak French well.

Especially with beginners should the French spoken be accurately pronounced. Faults of pronunciation once fixed are very difficult to eradicate. In some places French has been introduced into grades below the high school, and the classes intrusted to teachers unable to pronounce well. Irreparable injury has thus been done. The utmost pains must be taken at the beginning, especially with the vowels; and the separate sounds, and words containing them, should be pronounced many times by the teacher and repeated by the pupil. For a long time every new word should thus be treated, and unless a phonetic text is used the pupil should always hear a new word before he tries to pronounce it.

Careful memorizing and frequent repetition of a few lines of simple prose are helpful and furnish a standard of pronunciation to which new words may be referred. Both for this and for mastering colloquial and idiomatic expressions, word order, and grammatical forms, it is advised that a small amount of French, preferably simple prose, be carefully memorized the first year. Later, selections may be made for their literary interest.

Most teachers know how they prefer to teach the rudiments of grammar in a given class. We may remark, however, that it is not for the secondary school to spend time over the many pages of exceptions, peculiarities in gender and number, idioms that one rarely sees and never thinks of using, and grammatical puzzles for which each learned grammarian has a different solution, that form so large a part of some grammars. The great universals, however (the regular and the common irregular verbs; negative and interrogative variations; the common use and meaning of moods and tenses; the personal pronouns and their position; the general principles governing the agreement of adjectives, pronouns, and participles; the partitive constructions; the possessives, demonstratives, interrogatives, and relatives; the most common adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions), should all be thoroughly understood by the end of the second year of high-school study, and subsequent study should give considerable facility in using them.

The verb seems most formidable; but when it is perceived that most forms of all verbs may be treated as identically derived from the "primitive tenses," the difficulties appear less numerous, and when the principle of stem differentiation under the influence of tonic accent, persisting in the older and more common verbs, is a little understood, the number of really unique forms is inconsiderable. Translating into English should mean giving in well-chosen language the exact thought and spirit of the original. Thus understood, it is extremely difficult, and should never be attempted by the pupil before the meaning of the original is clear to him. It is then rather an exercise in English than in French. Nothing should be accepted as English which is not English. The teacher who complacently listens while a pupil turns good French into bad English is, to put it mildly, not doing his duty. Translating into English is often the most rapid means of ascertaining whether the pupil has correctly understood the French read, but a few well-chosen questions asked and answered in French, or an abstract in the same language, is often equally effective as a test, and far better as training in French.

Just as English should be English, French should be French; and merely using French words and conforming to grammatical rules do not make a sentence French. At first, sentences formed by pupils should exactly follow French model sentences, being either verbatim reproductions or differing only in simple and immaterial verbal changes. Not until the pupil, by much assimilation of French

models, has become imbued with the form and spirit of the language, can he be safely left to his own invention. In choosing reading matter, the tendency is to select something too hard. The teacher adopts a book because it is worldrenowned, because it interests him personally, because it teaches a valuable lesson, moral or historical. While all pedagogical roads should lead to the Rome of a broad culture, the attempt to teach literature, æsthetics, history, or morality from a work in which linguistic difficulties dismay the pupil and engross his attention, can only end in making him detest both the book and its lessons. The beginner in French can be taught these things best in the vernacular; while searching a dictionary to discover whether fut comes from faire or from falloir, he has little leisure to think of the relative merits of literary schools. Give him at first the easiest reading attainable, remembering that simple language does not mean infantile conceptions nor vice versa. Entertain no thought of teaching literature until the pupil is quite familiar with ordinary prose and can read page after page of the text assigned with no great need of grammar or dictionary. The classics of dramatic literature may very properly be postponed until the fourth year, and we do not consider them always desirable even then; but a few have been given among texts suitable for the third year in the hope that these rather than others will be selected by teachers who, for reasons of their own, choose to read something of the kind at this stage of the course.

The reading lists are meant to be illustrative simply, not exhaustive. Othertexts equally good might no doubt be mentioned under each head. The answers to the committee's circulars indicate clearly that teachers would not welcome a narrow range of prescribed reading, such as teachers of Latin have in their Cæsar, Cicero, and Virgil. A definite curriculum of that kind would no doubt have its advantages, but in the case of the modern languages it is not practicable and, upon the whole, not desirable. The disadvantages would far outweigh the advantages. The mass of available literature is so great, the preferences of teachers and the needs of classes so divergent, that the only safe course is to leave a large latitude of choice. This being so, it has seemed best merely to give examples of the kind of reading appropriate to each year.

SECTION XI. THE INTERMEDIATE COURSE IN FRENCH.

(a) THE AIM OF THE INSTRUCTION.

At the end of the intermediate course the pupil should be able to read at sight ordinary French prose or simple poetry, to translate into French a connected passage of English based on the text read, and to answer questions involving a more thorough knowledge of syntax than is expected in the elementary course.

(b) THE WORK TO BE DONE.

This should comprise the reading of from 400 to 600 pages of French of ordinary difficulty, a portion to be in the dramatic form; constant practice in giving French paraphrases, abstracts, or reproductions from memory of selected portions of the matter read; the study of a grammar of moderate completeness; writing from dictation.

Suitable texts are: About's stories; Augier and Sandeau's Le Gendre de M. Poirier; Béranger's poems; Corneille's Le Cid and Horace; Coppée's poems; Daudet's La Belle-Nivernaise; La Brète's Mon Oncle et mon curé; Madame de Sévigné's letters; Hugo's Hernani and La Chute; Labiche's plays; Loti's Pêcheur d'Islande; Mignet's historical writings; Molière's L'Avare and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme; Racine's Athalie, Andromaque, and Esther; George Sand's plays and stories; Sandeau's Mademoiselle de la Seiglière; Scribe's plays; Thierry's Récits

des Temps mérovingiens; Thiers's L'Expédition de Bonaparte en Egypte; Vigny's La canne de jonc; Voltaire's historical writings.

SECTION XII.-THE ADVANCED COURSE IN FRENCH.

(a) THE AIM OF THE INSTRUCTION.

At the end of the advanced course the pupil should be able to read at sight, with the help of a vocabulary of special or technical expressions, difficult French not earlier than that of the seventeenth century; to write in French a short essay on some simple subject connected with the works read; to put into French a passage of easy English prose, and to carry on a simple conversation in French.

(b) THE WORK TO BE DONE.

This should comprise the reading of from 600 to 1,000 pages of standard French, classical and modern, only difficult passages being explained in the class; the writing of numerous short themes in French; the study of syntax.

Suitable reading matter will be: Beaumarchais's Barbier de Séville; Corneille's dramas; the elder Dumas's prose writings; the younger Dumas's La Question d'argent; Hugo's Ruy Blas, lyrics, and prose writings; La Fontaine's fables; Lamartine's Graziella; Marivaux's plays; Molière's plays; Musset's plays and poems; Pellissier's Mouvement littéraire au XIXe siècle; Renan's Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse; Rousseau's writings; Sainte-Beuve's essays; Taine's Origines de la France contemporaine; Voltaire's writings; selections from Zola, Maupassant, and Balzac.

SECTION XIII.-SPECIMEN EXAMINATION PAPERS FOR ADMISSION TO COLLege.

The complaint is sometimes heard from teachers in the secondary schools-and investigation shows it to be not altogether groundless-that even at colleges having the same or very similar requirements for admission the entrance examinations are apt to differ not a little in respect to difficulty and in respect to the general character of the questions asked. To a certain extent this lack of uniformity is inevitable. With the best intentions examiners will differ more or less in their estimate of difficulty and in their choice of test questions. Some will prefer to set a more difficult paper and mark liberally; others to set an easier paper and mark more closely. The only obvious way to bring about uniformity in the papers set would be to intrust the preparation of them each year to a central committee or bureau (say of the Modern Language Association), which should furnish them on demand, in sealed packages and at a fixed rate, to such colleges as might wish to receive them. Such a plan would clearly have much in its favor. Under its operation there would be no room for criticism of particular colleges. The papers would presumably be prepared with very great care; they would improve in the light of criticism, would furnish teachers with a pattern to work by, and so could hardly fail to make for greater excellence and uniformity in the work of our secondary schools. The feasibility of such a plan would depend largely upon the attitude of the colleges, and whether it would work well in practice could only be determined by trial. Difficulties of one kind and another would no doubt arise, but they do not appear in advance to be insuperable. At any rate, the plan seems worthy of serious consideration.

Meanwhile, without wishing to imply an exclusive preference for a written as opposed to an oral test (the best plan, wherever practicable, is undoubtedly a combination of the two), the committee have thought it appropriate to close this report with a series of papers designed to illustrate in a general way the kind of test ED 98-90