Magical beginnings

One of the most ardent advocates of a natural method of language learning was Lambert Sauveur (1826-1907), a French emigrant to the United States. In Sauveur’s school in Boston, students spent at least one month entirely on intensive oral work, without a course book. In the early days, the school had a visit from ‘an eminent minister of the city’, who was skeptical of Sauveur’s claims. Before entering the class, the visitor was asked what he wanted the class to discuss. ‘God’ he responded. The class were on lesson 10 (about 25 hours of the course). Sauveur entered the class and discussed God with them for an hour, with no question remaining unanswered. The visitor was impressed. He said it was admirable and saw that it worked, though he could not imagine how. What Sauveur was able to do easily and most people find difficult was to talk to his students in such a way that they could understand what he was getting at, even if they did not understand every word. He had an intuitive knowledge of his students’ internalized competence, and could organise his own discourse in such a way that it matched the capacities of his learners. This is very much at the heart of all natural language teaching. Sauveur describes with enthusiasm what it feels like to teach a class the very first lesson in a foreign language without grammar, with the students being in rapt attention and not being deviated for a moment. Sauveur, when describing this experience, perfectly transmits the magic of such moments. (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 198-201)