special points, we should observe certain general rules which will be described and treated under the heading of gradation.

10. Gradation

Gradation means passing from the known to the unknown by easy stages, each of which serves as a preparation for the next. If a course or a lesson is insufficiently graded, or graded on a wrong basis, the student’s work will be marked by an excessive degree of inaccuracy. If a course is well graded, the student’s rate of progress will increase in proportion as he advances.

In the ideally graded course the student is caused to assimilate perfectly a relatively small but exceedingly important vocabulary; when perfectly assimilated, this nucleus will develop and grow in the manner of a snowball.

Care should be taken to distinguish between false grading and sound grading. The following applications of this principle are psychologically sound:

(a) Ears before Eyes.—The student to be given ample opportunities, at appropriate intervals, of hearing a sound, a word, or a group of words before seeing them in their written form (phonetic or other).

(b) Reception before Reproduction.—The student to be given ample opportunities, with appropriate intervals, of hearing a sound or combination of sounds, a word, or a group of words before being called upon to imitate what he hears.

(c) Oral Repetition before Reading.—The student to be given ample opportunities of repeating matter after the teacher before being called upon to read the same matter.

(d) Immediate Memory before Prolonged Memory.—The student should not be required to reproduce matter heard a long time previously until he has become proficient in reproducing what he has just heard.

(e) Chorus-work before Individual Work.—In the case of classes, new material should be repeated by the whole of the students together before each student is called upon to repeat individually. This will tend to ensure confidence.

(f) Drill-work before Free Work.—The student should not be given opportunities for free conversation, free composition, or free translation until he has acquired a reasonable proficiency in the corresponding forms of drill-work.

Each individual item in the teaching should be graded, and in addition the whole course may be graded by dividing it into appropriate stages or phases, which will succeed each other en échelon.

11. Proportion

The ultimate aim of most students is fourfold:

(a) To understand what is said in the foreign language when it is spoken rapidly by natives.

(b) To speak the foreign language in the manner of natives.

(c) To understand the language as written by natives.

(d) To write the language in the manner of natives.

We observe the principle of proportion when we pay the right amount of attention to each of these four aspects, without exaggerating the importance of any of them.

There are five chief branches of practical linguistics:

(a) Phonetics, which teaches us to recognize and to reproduce sounds and tones.

(b) Orthography, which teaches us to spell what we have already learnt by ear.

(c) Accidence and etymology, which teaches us the nature of inflected forms and derivatives, and also how to use them.

(d) Syntax and analysis, which teaches us how to build up sentences from their components.

(e) Semantics, which teaches us the meanings of words and forms.

We observe the principle of proportion when we pay the right amount of attention to each of these five branches, without exaggerating the importance of any of them.

In choosing the units of our vocabulary we may be guided by several considerations, such as intrinsic utility, sentence-forming utility, grammatical function, regularity, facility, concreteness, or completeness. We observe the principle of proportion when we select the material of our vocabularies in such a way that due attention is paid to all such desiderata, and without exaggerating the importance of any of them.

We also observe the principle of proportion when we give the right amount of drill-work or free work, of translation-work or ‘direct’ work, of intensive reading or extensive reading. A well-proportioned course, like a well-graded course, ensures a steady and ever-increasing rate of progress.

12. Concreteness

We are enjoined by the principle of concreteness to teach more by example than by precept. When we give explanations we should illustrate these by striking and vivid examples embodying the point of theory which is the subject of our explanation. One example is generally not enough; it is by furnishing several examples bearing on the same point that we cause the student to grasp that which is common to them all.

But this is not enough: the examples themselves may vary in concreteness; therefore we should select for our purpose those which demonstrate in the clearest possible way the point we are teaching and which tend to form the closest semantic associations. We should utilize as far as possible the actual environment of the student: the grammar of the noun is best understood when we talk of books, pencils, and chairs; the grammar of the verb is best grasped when we choose as examples verbs which can be ‘acted’; black, white, round, square are more concrete adjectives than rich, poor, idle, diligent.

There are four ways of teaching the meanings of words or forms:

(1) By immediate association, as when we point to the object represented by a noun.

(2) By translation, as when we give the student the nearest native equivalent.

(3) By definition, as when we describe the unit by means of a synonymous expression.

(4) By context, as when we embody the word or expression in a sentence which will make its meaning clear.

These four manners are given here in what is generally their order of concreteness; it is interesting to note in this connexion that translation is not nearly so ‘indirect’ or ‘unconcrete’ as the extreme ‘direct methodists’ have led us to suppose.

It is for the teacher to judge under what conditions each of these four manners of teaching meanings may be appropriately used.

13. Interest

No work is likely to be successfully accomplished if the student is not interested in what he is doing, but in our efforts to interest the pupil we must take care that the quality of the teaching does not suffer. Habit-forming work has the reputation of being dull and tedious. The remedy, however, would not be to abandon it in favour of work which in itself is or seems more interesting (such as reading, composition, and translation exercises), for by so doing we should merely be leaving undone work which must be done. The true remedy is to devise a number of varied and appropriate exercises in order to make the habit-forming work itself interesting.

The most ingenious and interesting arithmetical problems alone will not assist the student in memorizing the multiplication table, and the most ingenious and interesting sentence-building devices alone will not cause the student to obtain the necessary automatic command of the fundamental material of the language.

There are notably six factors making for interest (and the observing of