APPENDIX L TEACHING OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN SCHOOLS
Dr. Wilder Penfield who is a distinguished neurologist and neuro- surgeon some time ago visited this country and gave two talks on the subject of the Human Brain and the Learning of Secondary Languages. The talks which were printed by the All India Radio are at Annexure XVI. The main theory which Dr. Penfield put forward in these talks in his own words is :
"The brain of a boy in his teens is not the same as that of a child under ten for the brain is not a machine like other machines. It is a living, growing changing mechanism the most complicated and astonishing of all mechanisms During the earlier period the child is depositing, within the brain, language units which he will later utilize for all additions to his vocabulary. These are units of pronunciation and also of understanding. The unit is recorded in the nerve cells of the brain for use in that language immediately or at some later time. In later life he may expand his vocabulary from 300 to 10,000 words, for example, but he will probably pronounce all the words acquired at a later age in a manner that betrays the accent of his early teachers.
"Now, if during the early period of life a child is in contact with people who speak other languages he will lay down language units of each of those secondary languages, whether they are Hindi, English, Arabic or Chinese. And the few hundreds of words that he acquires early in each language way seem to be lost, but the speech units never. Ever, a less used language can be expanded later with relative ease.
"A child who has heard only one language, and who approaches the second and third language later, employs the language units of his mother tongue for all the others. He is now in the stage or should be, for expanding his vocabulary normally, and he tries to use the units of native Hindi, for example, when studying the perplexing mysteries of the English tongue. All the rules of syntax and grammar in all the adult books of speech analysis are of little help.
"The brain is now becoming inflexible as far as the beginning of a new language is concerned. It is rigid. The organ which once specialized in the acquisition of new language units has lost the art. It is row organised for the enlargement of vocabulary.
"It may be convenient for those who must plan the school curriculum to postpone the teaching. of secondary language until the second decade of life. But the plan will never do what we should like to have it do. It defies the laws of progressive change in the capacity of the brain.
"The time to begin what might be called a general Schooling in secondary languages, in accordance with the demands of brain physiology is between the ages of 4 and 10. The child sets off for school then and he can still learn new languages directly without interposing the speech units of his mother tongue.
"I make no plea for any particular language anywhere. But if this method were to be employed in this country in areas, for example, where the mother tongue is neither English nor Hindi, teachers would have to be found who could conduct the first years in Hindi, others perhaps in English. They need Dot be specially trained in language teaching. After those primary years it would
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matter little what tongue was used in subsequent teaching. The growing child could later expand his vocabulary in any one or in all these languages with relative ease."
The Board at its last meeting recommended that every child at the Secondary stage should read three languages, namely, the mother tongue or the regional language and two others which in most cases would be English and Hindi. As the theory of Dr. Penfield has a direct bearing on the subject of languages, the Board may like to consider the points raised in Dr. Penfield's talks and give its advice.
Dr. J. C. Ghosh, Member, Planning Commission, thinks that in view of the theory put forward by Dr, Penfield, a young child, with abilities much above the average should start studying an Indian, language, other than his mother tongue, at the age of six and English as secondary language at the age of eight.
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ANNEXURE XVI
The Human Brain and the Learning of Secondary Languages Two talks by Mr. Wilder Penfield, O.M., M.D., F.R.S. broadcast from the External Services Division, All India Radio, Delhi on the Learning of Secondary Languages
CANADA AND INDIA have strong bonds of mutual understanding. We face common problems within and without. India is a land of many languages. Canada is bilingual country. French is the mother tongue of the majority in the province of Quebec, where I live. It has been suggested that I should give, two broadcast on the subject of the Human Brain and the Learning of Secondary Languages. But, I must confess at the outset, that I am a surgeon, not a school teacher. My life has been spent in the study of the nervous system and in an effort to treat its disorders.
The mind of man depends for its very existence upon the brain. There is no learning, no thinking, no conscious mental state that is not based on activity within the brain. No conscious act is possible, no word is spoken until thought, can express itself in a pattern of nerve impulses within the brain, electrical impulses that travel swiftly, outward along nerve fibres to the muscles to move them. This is not the time or place to discuss how nervous action is translated, into thought, nor how it is that thought expresses itself in nerve impulse.
A consideration of the neurophysiological mechanisms of speech should have its educational consequences. The human brain is man's master organ, and its control of speech is what chiefly distinguishes it from the brain of other mammals. Therefore, I would urge parents and educators to give some thought to this organ, and how it learns languages. Perhaps they may discover why the teaching of secondary languages in schools, according to accepted curricular planning, is so much more laborious, so much less successful than the teaching of the primary tongue by mothers, or the teaching of secondary languages by servants and governesses in the home.
The brain of a boy in his teens is not the same as that of a child under ten, for the brain is not a machine like other machines. It is a living, growing changing mechanism the most complicated and astonishing of all mechanisms. During the earlier period the child is depositing, within the brain, language units which he will later utilize for all additions to his vocabulary. These are units of pronunciation and also of understanding. The unit is recorded in the nerve cells of the brain for use in that language immediately or at some later time. In later life he may expand his vocabulary from 300 to 10,000 words, for example, but he will probably pronounce all the words acquired at a later age in a manner that betrays the accent of his early teachers.
These original units axe more than motor skills of tongue and lip; they are units of sound and units of thought established in a physical form within the brain. He uses these units over and over again while he is constructing the special areas of the cerebral cortex. nerve cell basis of each new word, and he deposits these word pattern in The cerebral cortex, as you know, is a rather thick layer of gray matter made up of nerve cells. The underlying white matter contains the nerve cell
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fibres which run like long wires to other, more distant, nerve cells. The fibres have insulating coats so that they can carry active electrical impulses here and there.
Now, if during the early period of life a child is in contact with people who speak other languages he will lay down language units of each of those secondary languages whether they are Hindi, English, Arabic or Chinese. And the few hundreds of words that he acquires early in each language may seem to be lost, but the speech units, never. Even a less used language can be expanded later with relative ease.
A child who has heard only one language, and who approaches the second and third languages later, employs the language units of his mother tongue for all the others. He is now in the stage or should be, for expanding his vocabulary normally and he tries to use the units of native Hindi, for example, when studying the perplexing mysteries of the English tongue. All the rules of syntax and grammar in all the adult books of speech analysis are of little help.
The brain is now becoming inflexible as far as the beginning of a new language is concerned. It is rigid. The organ which once specialized lit the acquisition of new language units has lost the art. It is now organized for the enlargement of vocabulary.
If proof is needed for this thesis, it may be found in the fact that when the speech area of an adult, which is located in a circumscribed portion of the left cerebral cortex, is destroyed by injury or disease, that unfortunate man may learn to speak again but if the destroyed area was large he will never speak well. On the other hard, if a child under 10 or 12 years of age suffers such an injury he also becomes completely speechless too, for a time. But at the end of a year he will be speaking again and speaking well. In order to do that he will have established new speech units and patterns in the language areas of the opposite hemisphere which was formerly the minor or non-dominant side. There is much greater flexibility of function in the child's brain.
It may be convenient for those who must plan the school curriculum to postpone the teaching of secondary language unit the second decade of life. But the plan will never do what we should like to have it do. It defies the laws of progressive charge in the capacity of the brain.
Suppose a government were to pass a law that marriage must wait until the age of forty. Perhaps there might be certain reasonable and logical advantages for such a plan. Perhaps it might succeed if men and women were machines instead of living, growing, changing creatures. You will say that the law would be contrary to the nature of man. I would say the same of a school curriculum in which the teaching of secondary languages first makes its appearance at 16. Our laws and our edicts cannot alter human physiology.
For bilingual countries and for multilingual countries the learning of secondary languages is of the greatest importance, But it is of importance to other countries also. The curtains that shut off one nation from another and one ideology from another are not made of iron. They are made of words ignorance of secondary languages blinds us so we cannot see, through suck curtains.
Each of the peoples of the world has its own peculiar way of life, its chosen ways of worship. These are internal matters. Self determination is the very
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essence of liberty. Twenty years ago, Dr. Radhakrishnan said in his Oxford lectures: "Nothing is good which is not self chosen; no determination is valuable which is not self determination".
And yet no nation is sufficient upto itself. No language group within any country can live to itself alone. It is the secondary language that open to us the thought and the culture of others, building thus a bridge to peace.
Without a secondary language we, in the West, could not have shared with you the wisdom and the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi. I think it is not too much to say that the people of the whole world are better for that man's example. But this applies especially to the nations of the Commonwealth, Britain along with the rest of us, and the United States no less.
The world has much to learn from India, especially in the realm of intellectual and spiritual tolerance. For "Hindu", to quote the words of Radhakrishnan once again, "the Hindu has acknowledged that truth wears many vestures of many colours and speaks in strange tongues".
In my next broadcast I shall refer again to the speech mechanisms within the human brain and suggest how the mother's method of teaching might be employed in schools, without defying the laws of neurophysiology and without, it seems to me, increasing the total costs.
II
IN my previous broadcast I referred to the human brain as the "master organ". The learning and the use of language might be called the major skill of this organ. After all, the chief difference between a man and other animals is that the man can speak. It is by the spoken word and the written word that the ignorance of childhood is changed into the understanding knowledge of educated men and women.
Animals come into the world endowed with certain brain reflexes that provide them with what seems to be racial memories. These apparent memories, which we, call instincts, serve to guide them in their house-building, Migration mating, pursuit of food. But such instincts are strangely lacking in us. If we Aid not teach, and if we could not learn, we would be more helpless than all other creatures.
Speaking, and the understanding of speech, also reading and writing, depend upon the employment of certain specialized areas of one hemisphere, the dominant hemisphere of the brain. When a baby is born these speech areas of the cerebral cortex are like a clean blank slate, ready to be written upon. There is an optimum age within the first decade of life when these special areas are plastic and receptive. I pointed out in my previous broadcast that speech. units, which may be employed in the later expansion of vocabulary, can be "deposited" as it were with ease in the nerve-cell mechanisms of these areas at this early age.
The method of teaching children their mother's own language has been the same in all lands and in all ages. It is extraordinarily efficient. It conforms to the changing capacities of the child's brain. We may well call it the mother's method. It has been used by servants and tutors in the home to teach one, two or even more secondary languages from the beginning of history even though educators today do not generally employ the method in schools.
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The mother's method is simple. Even before he understands, the mother talks to her child. And while he is learning he is listened to (usually I may say with delighted admiration). Language is for him only, a means to an end, never an end in itself. When he learns about words he is learning about life, learning to got what he wants, learning to share his own exciting ideas with others, learning to understand wonderful fairy tales and exciting facts about trains and trucks and animals and dolls. One secret of the success of this method is that it is employed while, a child is forming the speech units in his eager little brain.
A child who hears three languages instead of one early enough, learns the units of all three without added effort and without confusion. I have watched this experiment in my own home, as many of my listeners may have done.
Our children heard only German in the nursery because they had a German governess. At the age of 3 and 4 they entered a French nursery school. With their parents and others outside the school and outside the nursery, they heard English.
It was a conditioned reflex for those children, on entering the school room, to utilise the language units of the French tongue, a conditioned reflex on meeting the governess to use German units. There was no confusion.
After 2 years in the French nursery school they entered a regular English school. Here some years elapsed, too many perhaps, before French and German Were presented to them as. regular secondary languages. But they found the work easy and their accents were good. Hidden away in the brain of each were the speech units of those languages, waiting to be employed in the expansion of a vocabulary.
Of course, there is nothing new in all this. The experiment succeeded. But not all households can include a governess. If public education is to incorporate in the curriculum secondary languages, the curriculum should be planned according to the changing aptitudes of the human brain. When new languages are taken up for the first time in the second decade of life, it is difficult, though not impossible, to achieve a good result. It is difficult because it is unphysiological. The learning is no longer direct. Instead, the speech units of the mother tongue are interposed.
In this new day of nationalism and freedom, educators seek, quite rightly, to make education available to all. Higher education is organized for those who have the wit and wish to enter academic and professional life. But unless the mother's method is introduced into the schools majority, even of those who are taught, will continue to fail to, master any language but their mother tongue.
Bilingualism is not a handicap to a country. It has been a great benefit to mankind and multilingualism also. The language of Greece served the Romans very well as a second language for centuries, and, both Greek and Latin, were lamps in the great darkness of medieval Europe until the time of the Renaissance. Then, through these two secondary languages, the light of by-gone day flooded the minds of men, who woke, as though from sleep. Latin and Greek, like Sanskrit, are now dead languages, much prized by scholar but largely useless for practical purpose.
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Today, access to Europe's past, and to the world's present, is only possible through a European language. We, in the Commonwealth of Nations are well served by the English tongue for that purpose.
The time to begin what might be called a general schooling in secondary languages, in accordance with the demands of brain physiology, is between the ages of 4 and 10. The child sets off for school then and he can still learn new languages directly without interposing the speech units of his mother tongue.
Suppose we discuss a hypothetical day-school in the bilingual community that I know best, that of the city of Montreal and the province of Quebec. A million citizens in Montreal have French for their mother tongue, and less than half, that number, English. Suppose the school is located in an English speaking section of the city. Let the first years then, from nursery school and kindergarten on to the grades for children of eight or ton years, be conducted by teachers whose mother tongue is French.
The French teachers must speak only their native tongue in school, at work and at organized play, with never a word of translation. Thus the little ones would begin their years of normal play, drawing, singing and memorizing, in French. They would be taught no language as such, but the teachers would "get on" from fairy tales to folk literature as rapidly as the child's mind is prepared for it. These children would have been hearing Mother Goose stories and such things at home, and their play at the weekends, as well as the home discipline and religious observance, would have been carried out in English.
Two or three years of this might well be enough. If so, they could be rotated then into a school or department conducted in another secondary language as desired. For all I know this might be carried out with one language in the morning and the other in the afternoon since in any case the entrance into the morning class would be a conditional reflex that started the child in the one language while the entrance into the afternoon class might be continuing reflex for starting him into the second language.