Читать книгу The Principles of Language-Study - Harold E. Palmer - Страница 12

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Accuracy means conformity with a given model or standard, whatever that model or standard may happen to be. If we choose to take colloquial French or colloquial English as our standard, the forms pertaining to classical French or English (i.e. traditionally correct forms) are to be rejected as inaccurate. There are two types of inaccuracy: that in which a colloquial form is replaced by a classical form and vice versa, and that in which a native form is replaced by a pidgin form. In both cases the teacher’s duty is to react against the tendency towards inaccuracy.

Appropriate drills and exercises exist which ensure accuracy in sounds, stress, intonation, fluency, spelling, sentence-building and -compounding, inflexions, and meanings.

The principle of accuracy requires that the student shall have no opportunities for making mistakes until he has arrived at the stage at which accurate work is reasonably to be expected.

If we compel a student to utter foreign words before he has learnt how to make the requisite foreign sounds, if we compel him to write a composition in a foreign language before he has become reasonably proficient in sentence-building, or if we compel him to talk to us in the foreign language before he has done the necessary drill-work, we are compelling him to use the pidgin form of the language.

In addition to specific exercises and devices which ensure accuracy in special points, we should observe certain general rules which will be described and treated under the heading of gradation.