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Posted by
jeong
Date
2007-11-13 11:33:05
Title/Subject
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In his The Art of Learning and Studying Foreign Languages(1880), Francois Gouin described a painful set of experiences that finally led to his insights about language teaching. Having decided in his midlife to learn German, he took up residency in Hamburg for one year. But rather than attempting to converse with the natives he engaged in a rather bizarre sequence of attempts to "master" the language.
Upon arrival in Hamburg he felt he should memorize a German grammar book and a table of the 248 irregular German verbs! He did this in a matter of only 10 days and then hurried to "the academy"(the university) to test his new knowledge. "But alas!" he wrote, "I could not understand a single word, not a single word!" Gouin was undaunted. He returned to the isolation of his room, this time to memorize the German roots and to rememorize the grammar book and irregular verbs. Again he emerged with expectations of success. "But alas!"--the result was the same as before.
In the course of the year in Germany Gouin memorized books, translated Goethe and Schiller, and even memorized 30,000 words in a German dictionary--all in the isolation of his room, only to be "make conversation " as a method, but this caused people to laugh at him and he was too embarrassed to continue that method. At the end of the year, Gouin, having reduced the classical method to absurdity, was forced to return home, a failure.
But there is a happy ending. Upon returning home Gouin discovered that his 3-year-old nephew had, during that year, gone through that wonderful stage of child language acquisition in which he went from saying virtually nothing at all to become a veritable chatterbox of French. How was it that this little child succeeded so easily in a task, mastering a first language, that Gouin, in a second language, had found impossible? The child must hold the secret to learning a language! So Gouin spent a great deal of time observing his nephew and other children and came to the following conclusions:
Language learning is primarily a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions. Children use language to represent their conceptions. Language is a means of thinking, of representing the world to oneself.
So Gouin set about devising a teaching method that would follow from these insights. And thus the Series Method was created, a method that taught learners directly (without translation) and conceptually (without grammatical rules and explanations) a "series" of connected sentences that are easy to perceive. The first lesson of a foreign language would thus teach the following series of 15 sentences:
I walk toward the door.
I draw near to the door.
I draw nearer to the door.
I get to the door.
I stop at the door.
I stretch out my arm.
I take hold of the handle.
I turn the handle. I open the door.
I pull the door.
The door moves.
The door turns on its hinges.
The door turns and turns.
I open the door wide.
I let go of the handle.
The 15 sentences have an unconventionally large number of grammatical properties, vocabulary items, word orders, and complexity. This is no simple "Voici la table" lesson! Yet Gouin was successful with such lessons because the language was so easily understood, stored, recalled, and related to reality.