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advance of many you may have admitted, and who will, by their physical energy and force, soon show the required preparation. And when they go out of your college they will show themselves to So while you have be men who will do you and themselves honor. rules, and while we have rules, we have sometimes to contravene them. I have been greatly pleased-you will remember at the beginning of the Convocation, I had to refer to the organization of the Convocation and the Board of Regents, the things suggested, the plans adopted and what we sought to do. We desire to come in contact with you; we have no other business as a body but to promote education; we have no plan, or purpose, or care, but what shall be best for the schools at large; hence it is that we seek for advice in that attrition which comes from the contact of men on these great questions. better. I have It enables us to do our work better; we know been glad to hear these discussions, not only to-day, but other days, on these very great subjects which demand attention, from the educative body of men who look after this work and who try to do it as well as they can. I thank you for your patient attention. It has been a very inclement season; it has required patience as well as enthusiasm. I thank you, gentlemen. Go home and believe you have been received, received not only with welcome when you came, but receive our profound thanks at the close of the Convocation.

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I pronounce the Convocation adjourned without day.

NOTE.

XII.

On the "Natural Method" of Teaching Language.

By Principal G. C. SAWYER.

The following paper was read at the Convocation of 1886, but as a copy of it was not received in time to be included in the proceedings of that Convocation, it is here inserted

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The three points that occur to me in discussing this subject, are the age of the student, the end in view, also whether the classical or the modern languages are in question. The first two, are more or less, though not always, implicated with each other; while the last, some refuse to treat separately. I myself shall not undertake to treat them under distinct heads. The claim of the thorough-going advocates of the so-called "New or "Natural Method" is that all should come to the study of a foreign tongue, as does the child to its own native speech. The thing and the word which stands as its symbol are to be taken together, and the concrete is to precede the abstract. A few words only are to be at first used, always as spoken, and these are to be worked up into every possible combination with the teacher or alone in private study. So great care is to be taken, says one authority, that ten minutes only, even for the mature pupil, of concentrated attention are at first to be given several times each day, so that the probationer, young or old, may "master," as the phrase is, these few, and thus in time acquire all possible combinations. The object-system is to be carried out as far as possible. Instead of words with their numerous affixes and prefixes, as in the grammar a name mentioned only to be rejected Felix Franke would have the word always presented only in actual combinations, as in the sentence. Berlitz and Prendergast warn the beginner against translating, while Franke, for the perfect mastery of living speech, procribes it altogether, thus making liberal use of the Italian adage, “traduttore, traditore;" i. e. "The translator is a traitor." The teacher's voice and phraseology are to be all in all; no book for a time at least is to be used. In an hour spent with the persuasive M. Saveur, his system was explained and applied to Latin. A certain number of words are to be learned in their connection, as occurring in the first sentences of the first chapters of Cæsar's Commentaries. After the meanings of these words are once given as here

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occuring, the same are to be repeatedly used and re-used in ot combinations, so that in this way by repetitions a number of secti are to be appropriated, to be learned in esse and in extenso. In expressive words of M. Saveur, "the pupil is to eat, to drink, to sle nothing but Cæsar."

If the pupil could (as the system assumes for its success) be set study uninterruptedly any one language or any one subject, othe being for the time held in abeyance, he could doubtless be taught classical, or a modern language very readily and in a comparative short time. This assumption needs to be distinctly met, as a sophi try easy of exposure, but which persuasively put has imposed up some. But the average American boy or girl is having two other rec tations a day at school, and, outside of these language lessons is usin his own language. freely all this time. Then there are his vacation when the process cannot be kept up, unless he is caught and force into a Summer School of Languages. In short, the child has some thing else to do, and cannot be thus isolated from his own language and his attention kept wholly upon another, unless he is taken to a foreign land. Next, as I understand, the syntax is to be measurably allowed, always, however, as secondary, and never until a corresponding or including form, a phrase, or rather a sentence (says Prendergast even a long one") has been first-mastered as fully as one in the native language.

Now, so far as this system is to be applied to children either in the kindergarten, or by private tuition, or in the family circle, with the aim merely to acquire facility, or to read easy authors, I do not care to object, even so far as the classes are concerned. So far as this may come in to supplement or supersede the teaching of language, if taught in a humdrum and lifeless way it may have its place, and be especially successful with a small class, and with the young. But the protest comes in when this is put forward as new, or as the only correct method. There is nothing new, so far as I am aware, in maintaining that to learn to talk, you must have frequent practice in any language. But to aver that this method, as described, is to supplant the regular one now in use, by which, in our best schools, boys and girls are taught so as to be able to read in due time the best authors in their respective languages, and that such method is to be dismissed with the epithet "unnatural," is what must be firmly met. Here in sooth we have a plan proposed, which, to the popular mind at least, seems to do away with grammar as nonsense, and is to clear away all the impediments which school masters have so long insisted upon placing in the road to learning. The hard study, the close thinking, the accurate habits

of observation, the applied logic, all inseparable from a correct study, and true mastery of the classics, and which are needed also for an accurate and scholarly knowledge of German may now be dispensed with. Let me show how the leaven is working. "Ex uno disce omnes' ("tales," at least).

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A district or school commisioner, to my own knowledge, visited one of our best known academies which, tried by the tests of the Regents' examinations, as also by those for admission to colleges of the highest rank, maintains an honorable distinction and has scarcely ever had an applicant even for Harvard University rejected; where pupils succeed not as their sole course, but in connection with other branches of study taught in parallel courses, in learning to read in Latin and Greek, German or French, both passages from authors "required" and also others "at sight."

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The visitor saw and heard classes going through the daily routine of recitation. Passages were read in the original and then translated, unfortunatly from a book,-"Cæsar" or "Cicero," "Xenophon" or "Schiller"- words were "parsed." A pupil was told to put upon the blackboard all the cases or tenses of some noun or verb, or synonyms were called for, or a rhetorical expression illustrated by an equivalent passage of an English author. If it were "Composition Day" the blackboard was covered in a few minutes with sentences written in one or other of the ancient or modern languages, according to models perhaps actually written in a book, a few of the words only being supplied. Thus, according to the grade of the class visited, the different recitations in this or any school of high standing in our State (and we have many such!) would furnish any day in the term, as its regular routine -- (I insist upon the term,) — examples of both classical and modern languages taught synthetically and analytically, the memory not being overloaded but gradually strengthened, the faculty of observation sharpened, the reason trained to nice distinctions, the niceties and beauties of rhetoric exemplified; but all according to a gradual plan, so that no step be taken too far in advance, or without knowing the reason why. In short languages are taught, the modern more especially, as vehicles of communication, both in speaking (to a certain extent) and in writing, particular attention paid to translation for reading purposes, the classical as the best models of literature in its broadest sense, and as the most perfect means yet known for the education in the fullest sense of the youthful intellect. But like the young man mentioned in Scriptures, this school commissioner "went away sad," and published in the newspaper of a neighboring town a melancholy account of the want of progress in that school. For after

praising much that he saw and speaking in courteous terms of the well furnished teachers and the excellent state of preparation evinced by the pupils, he deplored the waste of time and the loss of such excellent powers of instruction, entailed by the "old-fashioned way of teaching" instead of the "new and natural method."

If this ingenuous gentleman had passed through the streets of our cities in succession, following the peregrinations of certain ambulatory "professors of modern languages," he would doubtless have been gratified on seeing (as I have seen), this placard: "German taught by the natural method in twenty-four lessons." Had the placard read "for twenty-four lessons," I would find no fault, for thereby the expositor would not have committed himself to the statement as to how many times twenty-four lessons would be needed in order to learn the language. But deliberately to put up such a sign, implies in the signer either a shameful lack of knowledge of the English language, or such a preposterously false claim, as should keep away from such a pretender the honest and diligent student, who will know enough already to be aware that there is no "royal road" to learning a modern language, or any thing else worth the learning.

Let us consider the proposition that we must all "become as little children in order to enter the kingdom" of a new language. Is it not well known that the things which as children we easily learn, we also easily forget? An English child taken abroad will easily pick up much of a foreign tongue, but after returning home will as easily lose it all, unless it is kept up by conversation, or fixed by reading and study. It does not require the experience of a Hamerton to believe that it is impossible to speak more than two languages with perfect mastery; even then, when mainly practicing one, even the gifted linguist loses something of the other language. The child learns, it is true, either in this country when exposed to the requisite influences, or abroad, the foreign language heard, but what language? The language of children! How many years does it take a child to acquire mastery over its native tongue? No less than sixteen years, and, even then, much of the literary vocabulary is still left to be acquired only by the close student and wide reader, in process of still farther time. A teacher is often surprised to find that he cannot take for granted that even an intelligent school girl knows the meaning of not uncommon literary words. The misspelling, so common in examination papers, mainly among pupils whose opportunities out of school, have been most limited, shows this, as well as the mispronunciation of similar words in reading even English at sight. Only the other day my attention was called to a case of this kind. A girl, eighteen years old, not wanting