Trammi
- Author:
Lilain F. Taylor
The subject of speech training is so large an one and of so great import- ance to the teacher that it is difficult to know where to begin. This paper cannot in any way deal with the special difficulties presented by the backward child, for the writer does not know enough of that child to be an authority on the subject. Rather it hopes to arouse thought on the subject in the ordinary teacher who perhaps has not had much time or opportunity lately to devote to speech work as a subject by itself, and one of great importance. The study of the subject presents a large field of activity which may be viewed from several sides.
From one viewpoint we can look at speech work as a factor of significance in the solution of some of our social problems. The student may approach the work believing it to be a force, which may help towards the destruction of the unnatural barriers of class distinction. We all realise, after a moment’s thought, how sensitive we are about our ” accent,” how a slur cast upon it fills us with resentment and raises an invisible?we will hope momentary? barrier between us and our critics. Only to-day in a conversation about a teacher applying for a post, I was told, “Yes, she lost it because her accent was so bad. She seemed surprised and could not understand why she had lost it and I could not tell herl ” This resentment is felt by classes as well as by individuals. That teacher will be doing social work of great value who can lead the way to the study of speech, all speech, not only what in the past has been called correct speech, but the unemotional acceptance of all speech, all accents, as a subject of study; my speech, your’s, everybody’s, as a thing for investigation and scientific interest, praising none, blaming none, but experimenting with all.
One does not despise a Frenchman for speaking French. Then why a Yorkshire man for speaking Yorkshire? or a Somerset man for Somerset, or a Londoner for his Cockney? Surely it is very ignorant to be amused or superior because one happens to be born and bred in a different part of Eng- land from one’s companion!
It is to see this egotistical attitude replaced by one of quiet scientific pleasure and interest, that the student, who looks at speech as a matter of social importance, hopes to see in the schools. Also, he hopes never to hear the word “bad” spoken or suggested in connection with speech, until the unpleasant slur which has become connected with it has been forgotten. But this will take? how long? Never mind, let us begin!
From another viewpoint we see speech as a medium of artistic expression. Judging by present results, there is plenty of room for exploration in this part of the field. Here so many weeds have been allowed to grow in the past because of careless and artificial gardening, that much labour is needed before the ground is clean and sweet, for the flowers of speech to grow. Then the music of the spoken word, the rhythm of the spoken phrase, becomes a conscious joy to both speaker and listener. Those teachers who chanced to read an article in the Times Educational Supplement some time in July, entitled ” In praise of Rhetoric,” were given food for thought.
Still yet another point of view gives us a part of the field occupied by the doctor and the psychologist. Here we see man’s mind and spirit hampering, and hampered by, ineffectual and defective speech. This is a part of the field filled with fascinating and absorbing interest, in which many are crying for help, but in which the helper must have very careful scientific training?the quack here, as everywhere, is a danger to be carefully avoided.
This probably does not fully survey the whole subject, but it is perhaps sufficient to show that the speech trainer has a large field of selection. That being so, which shall the teacher choose? Shall he choose one part of the field and ignore the rest? Or shall he try to study them all? The latter, I think. This sounds alarming! But even if he have no time to go thoroughly into each branch, and I am sure he will not have time to do so (for each to be studied thoroughly demands a life-time of work) yet he must have some know- ledge of all branches in order to specialise in one. Then let him hear what the artist has to say on the subject, the phonetician, the doctor, the psychologist, for each one needs the other, and the teacher needs them all. By this means we may gain a wide view of what speech work may be to us and our children. To be seriously handicapped in this matter is to be seriously handicapped in our adaptation to life. Without intelligible speech we are cut off from our fellows, shut into a loneliness such as only the deaf, the dumb, and the in- articulate savage know.
Man, after centuries of difficult experiment, with few tools and no spec- ialised material, has built this bridge that he may communicate with his fellows, and everyone of us should share in the inheritance he has left. But even if we be elder sons in this inheritance, how difficult we find it to express our- selves adequately and beautifully in speech.
Though he inherits much, every child has to build this bridge anew. Do we realise what a tremendous undertaking it is for a little child to learn to speak? And that he carries out this enormous task by himself with very little help? He learns to make the most delicate adjustments with clumsy materials. Having done this he next, with untiring perseverance, repeats the exercise again and again for speed and skill. Do we ever again attack problems with such courage as in our first few years?
Could we receive more help than we usually do at that time ? Undoubt- edly we could, if the adult in contact with the child at that formative time knew more about the subject himself! If mothers and fathers, nurses and teachers, had a better understanding of their own speech from all the above points of view, how much help they could give the beginner. Note that I use the word ” help,” not ” interference ” : there is a difference. Knowing their own difficulties, they would realise the significance of much in the child’s own way of tackling this problem, and be able to follow the child’s lead intelligently and unobtrusively, and so save much time and trouble in the future. If we only know “how,” it is so much easier to build at the beginning than to re-build later.
There is a time in the early life of the child when he has a passion for words and for their correct pronunciation. If full advantage of this period could be taken by some one who really understood, wonderful results would be achieved.
For die scientific explanation of speech you must go to the phonetician, for the method whereby to convey such knowledge to the child you must go to the child himself, calling upon the psychologist on the way.
The child generally has some way of his own of solving his most import- ant problems. What lead does he give us in this matter of learning to speak and gaining control of the speech apparatus in order to use it as a means of expression? He shows us, for one thing, that he employs movement and rhythmic repetition as a means of reinforcing his growing power, and he listens, listens, listens! Remember that the greater part of speech training is car training, and yet, outside the music lesson, how much ear training do we give children? Here is an opportunity for the inventive educationist to give us something sorely needed. To learn to speak we must speak, to learn to hear we must listen, and yet still there are many schools where silence is con- sidered the right environment for study! A teacher talking about a difficult class said lately, ” With so-and-so out of the room (the worst culprit), I can manage, I can even get silence! ” What an achievement! unless, of course, she was using silence for it’s own values, and they are great. To learn to listen to silence is a wonderful and moving lesson, but I fear me, this was not her object. She considered that silence was the respectable and desirable atmos- phere of the school-room. I don’t! Do you ?
A learning child’s activities, provided he is allowed to learn in his own way, can be drawn on a graph by flowing curves, never by straight lines, unless those straight lines are imposed upon him from without by some such con- trivance as a time table punctuated by time signals, such as bells! True, he often sits still in school for considerable periods because he must, and he strives to keep up to a straight line of attainment from 9 o’clock to 4 p.m., because he must, not because he thinks it wise! His native wisdom tells him all the time to reinforce thought, word, expression and perception with constantly flowing rhythms of movement. Why do we all sit still so much! Have not all great lovers of children felt this need for movement? Try it in connection with speech work or any other work: I am certain it will reinforce output and economise effort.
The child will also show us, if we will allow him to do so, that words at first signify things, not ideas. That is why Pat-a-cake baked a cake, and Bo-peep lost her sheep, and Jack and Jill fell down a hill. Facts, facts! There are no abstract ideas, similies and metaphors in nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are the child’s own classics, chosen by him generation after generation. In them we are not concerned with the emotional relationship between Bo-peep and her sheep, nor their poetic likenesses; they were not ” as cloudlets on a sky of green ! ” or ” lost children of a sorrowing mother.” Bo-peep was Bo-peep and the sheep were sheep, and they just lost one another, and that’s that! Probably it hurts the sentimentalist’s feelings, but that is all the child wants at first. The psychologist will tell you, I fancy, that the faculty of apperception by which we comprehend similies, metaphors, etc., is of a later development than the stage of which I am speaking.
All this is to warn the teacher that in the early years great care is necessary in the choice of stories and poems. Much confusion has been caused in nearly all our minds by the repetition of stuff of which we had little understanding. Such confusion does not help towards a clear and beautiful choice of words as a means of expression, neither does it help towards sensible and sen- sitive modulation and phrasing. How can we modulate and phrase what we only half understand? And so the seeds for satisfaction with a low standard of attainment are sown, and the habit of using words that we only half under- stand begins. It is true that at a very early stage the significance of the word does not very much matter. It is the jolly rhythm of the jingle that the child likes. As E. A. Greening Lamborne says, ” the delight of poetry is primarily a sensuous one?it has a natural power to charm, independent of the meaning of its words.” It certainly is at this early period. The cadence of the voice, a few nouns that he understands, rhythm and movement and the tiny child is satisfied. We cannot remain at this stage, but must not follow it immediately by the abstract thought of a lyric, with perhaps aspirations and ideals which are more the adult’s than the child’s. For some time he is con- cerned with the material and the matter of fact. Lead towards the other things by being yourself just a step or two in front of the child, watching to see whether he can keep pace with you. But do not go a mile ahead and seize his hand and make him jump it! If he is going at something like his own pace he will have time to look around and enjoy the landscape and tell us in expressive tones of his joy, pleasure, or distaste, and thus, and thus only, can we expect ” expression.”
In these nursery rhymes, too, the child shows his delight in rhyme. It is always the rhyming word that first attracts his attention and his memory His manifestation of delight in the fitness of the rhyming word corresponds to the joy that he shows in the successful manipulation of a piece of Montessori apparatus. It fits!
Here we have a few things to go upon. Repetition, Rhythm, Rhyme, Movement, Simple Ideas and Joyous Understanding of what we are speaking. But it is not all so easy as that! If we had our best teachers, our most care- fully built and best equipped environments given to the child between the ages of two and seven, it would be more simple and a great deal of energy on the part of teacher and child would be saved, but at present it is not always so. Often much has been done in the wrong way before the child comes into the care of the teacher. Careless fashions of speech have been allowed in the family and have been followed by the new-comer. Clumsy slipshod adjust- ments have sufficed. Ugly intonations have become fixed because the child has followed the fashion of the street, where in order to be heard at all above the din of traffic and the other egotists, one must necessarily cultivate a piercing shriek, using parts of the speech apparatus not used in more beautiful tones. What is to be done here ? It is no good leaving it to the child and nature at this stage. Some remedial form of treatment must be given. I remember asking Dr Montessori once, ” What are we to do with our late-comers? Some parents will not let us begin to educate the child until he is six years old. What are we to do then? ” For answer she smiled at me, and shrugged her shoulders ?and walked away! And how right she was! She did not want to tell me how to mis-apply her method, one of its principles being that it began at the beginning! She did not want to tell me, because she wants everyone to under- stand that these early years must not be wasted. But I believe I am right in saying that, faced with such a problem, she would have applied her principles in such a way that the spontaneous reaction of the child was brought forth, though the task would be more difficult and the result not so successful as if the treatment had been given at the psychological moment.
The child who comes with undesirable speech habits must not be blamed. If he be old enough, he should be helped to study speech sounds intelligently, watching in a mirror the contacts which different parts of the apparatus make. Let him know consonants and vowels, intonation and phrasing, as something alive, human, social. Let him reinforce all this with movement, rhythmic and plastic. Give him poetry and prose which appeals to him and which there- fore he can express, and then let him use this means of expression, of which he is now gaining control, as a medium for the expression of his own thoughts, and let him not be afraid to do so. Let him also watch others and compare and imitate until the whole is of living interest, and not a dreary task imposed by some superior being suggesting that it is a pity that he, the pupil, is made of such inferior clay?and really he must try to improve or what will people thin! If that last sentence, and others like it, has not been responsible for many of the horrible affectations and false standards in the past, I do not know what has! We must get away from such an atmosphere in connection with speech work.
For those who come with really defective speech, stammering, etc., the teacher should be in touch with speech clinics, which should be set up in all districts, and available to every teacher and child needing help. This is not the teacher’s job. To deal with delicate, intricate cases of this kind endless time and patience are required, besides special technical skill, and the teacher has much else to do. Though the teacher can do much to help the specialist by an intelligent seconding of the treatment advised, the ordinary class teacher should not be expected to deal with such cases alone.
I hope that this paper is not disappointing to some who may have thought it would help them technically with their own speech or tell them exactly how to take the subject in the class-room. On paper little more can be given than a few general principles. Speech training cannot be given through the written word. It is a thing which can only be studied through living sound and living contacts, through movement and rhythm, and never by sitting on a chair reading a book! Those who need such help can find it. Let such an one go to the phonetician, the first class artist, the doctor, etc. But these must be visited in the flesh. True results can only be achieved when the subject is treated for what it is?a thing of social intercourse.
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