IV

TEACHING TO SPEAK FRENCH IN COLLEGE

Can the high school teach its students to speak French? No one seems to maintain that it can. If not the high school, then the college. Can the college teach its students to speak French? The answer seems to the present writer to be: Certainly not without a very close adaptation of the means to the end; only if there is no hesitation as to aims, no loose coordinating of courses, no fundamental mistakes as to methods.

To avoid fundamental mistakes as to methods, the great desideratum would naturally seem to be to keep constantly in mind the psychological processes involved in the acquiring of a language. They are too often lost sight of.

Psychologically, the problem of learning to speak a language is the establishing of marginal habits of the ideomotor type. That is, to learn to speak a language, one must develop the power to make, unconsciously or with a minimum of consciousness, certain mental reactions and adjustments of the vocal organs in response to the stimulus of ideas.

The predicament of the student who, upon going to France after studying French for four years, is unable to rise to the emergency of asking for the simplest information, means only that he has not acquired the habit of setting off automatically the necessary adjustments in answer to the ideas he wants to express. His training has not taken into consideration the psychological exigencies of the case. All courses and methods that would aim to give a speaking knowledge of a language must be grounded firmly on this psychological aspect of the problem.

Now, what recommendations do the psychologists make touching the acquiring of habits such as the speaking of a language involves? An adjustment can become a habit,

they tell us, only thru a rather prolonged and unbroken series of repetitions, conscious at first, then left to function unconsciously.

"The formation of a habit," writes Professor W. C. Bagley, "is somewhat analogous to the concentration of a solution to the point of crystallization. One may add to such a solution increment after increment, but unless one final increment is added, the solution will remain in the liquid state. Similarly, in forming a habit, one may go thru with the slow and gradual process of repetition upon repetition, drill upon drill, but unless one final series of drills and repetitions is added, the plane of automatization is not reached."

Two further cautions are given by the same authority. "A process is automatized the more effectively, the more strenuously it is focalized in its initial stages," that is, the more strenuously it is practised consciously in its initial stages. On the other hand, Professor Bagley continues, "If one is to speak or write effectively, the form must be largely outside the focus of consciousness. Proper and effective mode of combining words must be so firmly fixt by practise that attention can be given unreservedly to the thought or content with full confidence that the form will, as it were, take care of itself. . . . . When one has mastered the use of correct speech, attention to these forms will very likely render the expression stilted and formal."2

As already stated, therefore, to learn to speak French is to acquire the power of starting automatically the necessary vocabulary and sentence structure in answer to the stimulus of ideas one wishes to express. And such power, it will be noted, can only be acquired at first by conscious and later by unconscious setting off of this vocabulary and sentence structures a very large number of times.

To learn to speak French or any other language is therefore not merely a question of what to learn but of how to 1 W. C. Bagley: The Educative Process, p. 123.

↑ Ibid., p. 119.

learn it. Thus, many a scholar is unable to speak the language on whose grammar he is an authority. He may be said to know the language, if to know all its rules of grammar and their history, its vocabulary and its derivation, is to know a language. What he has neglected is to go thru the processes necessary to develop the power to make his knowledge of the resources of the language function automatically. He has not set off his stores of knowledge a sufficient number of times to make this discharge automatic under a given stimulus. He has a static knowledge of the language as opposed to a dynamic. To speak a language is a dynamic process.

It should be clear, therefore, that, if we are to teach our students to speak French, the whole organization of our work must be towards securing for them, in the time at our disposal, the largest possible number of opportunities to set off the necessary adjustments between their knowledge of the resources of the language and the ideas they may have to express. All other types of language work may be valuable for one purpose or another, they may even be necessary for this practise in functioning the language, but, by themselves, they can never gain for the student the power to speak the language.

These other types of work include, of course, such as tend to develop the ability to understand and to translate the written language into English, the acquiring of a correct pronunciation, the ability to translate written English into written French, and the ability to understand the spoken language.

The development of the ability to translate the written language into English has been mentioned first, not because it is the one to which our colleges still seem to give the most attention, but because it must be dismist, at the outset, as the one which, necessarily, contributes the least to develop the power to speak the language.

It is, of course, an excellent exercise. It possesses disciplinary value. It is chiefly thru this kind of exercise, provided it be properly carried out, that the study of

modern languages can, tho only to some extent, replace the study of the ancient. It is often, also, the most practical type of work in view of conditions, too large a class or a teacher too inadequately prepared. But, since it does not in any way make the student practise the all essential adjustments between given ideas and their foreign expression, it is clear that it offers but the most remote preparation toward teaching him to speak the foreign language. What it does, precisely because it calls upon the student to make adjustments between given ideas and English, is to teach him to speak better English. It is an exercise which might well be extensively practised-in the English department.

What should in a large measure replace it, in a class where the aim is to teach to speak French, is obvious on the basis of the same principle. It is the retranslation into French of the English translation of a French masterpiece, since every line thus translated into French is a line of coordinations between ideas and their foreign expression.

The other possible types of work, those that aim at securing a correct pronunciation, the ability to translate written English into written French, and the ability to understand the spoken language, do make of course directly toward the acquiring of the power to speak the language.

Some English writer has said: "It is something, and a great deal too, to be able to pronounce French correctly; it is more to be able to translate it into English; it is more to be able to translate English into French; but there is still the speaking of French, which is, as to this matter, the great, general, practical, and desired talent. Mind, however, that in the acquiring of this talent you have got full ninetenths of the way, when you have learnt to translate, upon paper, English into French."

This statement is valuable, as it differentiates so well the different types of language study. It may be fully accepted provided it be clearly understood that without the last one-tenth mentioned, the other nine-tenths of effort

must remain abortive as far as a speaking knowledge of the language is concerned.

It is this last one-tenth of the work, thus considered, which it is the purpose of the present article to discuss further with reference to the college.

Obviously, however, it is not indifferent, in considering this last one-tenth of modern language study, to define where and how the other nine-tenths are expected to be secured. As few students who enter college without any French at all care to acquire more than a reading knowledge of the language, it is, no doubt, preferable to consider the question with reference to students who enter college after passing the Advanced French examination. Of such students, the college has a right to expect that they pronounce French fairly accurately, that they have a fair reading knowledge of the language, that they be well grounded in the essentials of the grammar and that they have a certain ability to translate written English into written French. Quantity of knowledge, however, does not settle the question of their preparation. Equally, if not more important, is the question of how this knowledge was secured, whether in such way that it is mere knowledge of data, or whether it is knowledge accompanied by the power to function these data.

The ideal examination for a student who wishes to enter college classes that are to fit him to speak French, would be one that could ascertain how many hundreds of times he has made orally how many hundreds of adjustments between ideas and their expression in French. It matters much whether he knows his irregular verbs; it matters still more whether he can make his knowledge of them function automatically in the expression of thought.

The college will teach its students to speak French the more readily, in proportion as it shall receive them already trained according to the methods essential to this particular purpose. Such well-trained students seem to be on the increase. They come in, however, with many others less well prepared and with at least as many not well pre