Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools
The more we advance in the study of the charts, the less need will there be for detailed practice, since intelligence has a place in study and provides the generalizations, the transfers, the sense of exceptions, etc., that reduce the burdens upon memory. The way in which the charts are constructed will indicate that we have made use of the cumulative effect of learning. While in the beginning we give material that is to be used as units in their own right, later we present parts of words which can be involved in a number of words, perhaps with radically different meanings and certainly with varying meanings when connected with prefixes or suffixes. This enhancement of the challenges offered is a tribute to the increase of power in the learner, who now can tackle much harder tasks than in the earlier stages of his apprenticeship. Everything we have discussed in this chapter is under the heading of a reduced vocabulary. But we must not convey the false idea that a restricted vocabulary is not wide. It will be seen from the contents of the first dozen charts that we are here considering a functional vocabulary of about 400 words, of which a few are not strictly functional, but are nouns introduced arbitrarily because of our choice of material. With 400 wellselected words, a large number of statements can be made. In practice, we will only make a small number to illustrate the use of the material for our end, which is acquisition of a language to a certain level of competence for different purposes (a visit, an examination, business, etc.). In the next chapter, we will cross the threshold of the various vocabularies and enter the field which covers the whole of each language we want to study. 72