BASIC ENGLISH Compiled by Julia E. Johnson
GENERAL DISCUSSION
BASIC ENGLISH AND ITS APPLICATIONS1
May I begin my account of Basic English by telling you
how I first became interested in it and what my connection
with it has been? I can best do this, I think, by explaining
how Basic English came into being. The story opens twenty
years ago, when Mr. C. K. Ogden—the creator of Basic
English— and I were writing a book called The Meaning of
Meaning together. More narrowly, the origin of Basic
English—as a theoretical possibility—can be traced to
Chapter 5 in that book. We were comparing definitions—
definitions of anything from a table to a force and from a
rabbit to a concept—and we were struck by the fact that,
whatever you are defining, certain words keep coming into
your definitions no matter how diverse the things you are
defining. This suggests that there might be a limited set of
words in terms of which the meaning of all other words
might be stated. If so, then a very limited language is
possible, a language which would put a description (using
only this limited set of words) in the place of any word
outside this limited set. That, of course, is an old idea, the
idea of the "universal characteristic" that was intriguing
Leibnitz, Bishop Wilkins, and others in the century before the
Royal Society of Arts was founded.
International languages and the general facilitation of
communication were even in those days one of Mr. Ogden's
chief preoccupations, and we discussed this possibility more
than a little. But there were many objections, as we saw it
then. I may mention two among them. (1) Even if such a
language could be worked out in ten or twenty years, to use it
would need far more intelligence than anyone can count
upon. (2)
We could not see how it could be made to read or sound at
all like ordinary current English.
Mr. Ogden found the solution a little later—partly
through suggestions which he came across in a study of the
nature of verbs, encouraged by Jeremy Bentham's remarks
on language, but largely through the deliberate cultivation
of a peculiar gift he has for saying the same thing in
different words for purposes of linguistic comparison. Of
course we all study how to vary our phrasing without, in
certain respects, changing our meaning; but we do so for
immediate practical aims, social or scholarly— to please,
to flatter, to wrap up, to break the shock, and so forth—not
in order to learn, by systematic and reflective inquiry, more
about bow language works. I have never found this facility
in rephrasing and in critically comparing the results
developed by anyone as Mr. Ogden developed it, and I see
in this special talent, combined with full and lively
understanding of all the relevant linguistic sciences, the
real origin of Basic English. I do not believe that the feat of
selecting a small part of the English language capable of
saying (with certain modifications, of course, which we
will consider later) all that the rest of the language can say,
would have been possible without it. Basic English is thus
the creation of an individual's special talent backed up by
modern theoretical linguistics.
By 1927 it was clear that a restricted English, capable
of serving as an adequate general medium for all affairs,
and confined to some number of words between 500 to
1,000, was possible. The problem then was to decide just
where a certain balance of advantages could best be
obtained. On the one hand it was obvious that the fewer the
words were and the simpler and more regular the
constructions, the more easily could this language be
learned. On the other hand was the enormously important
practical consideration that it must, if it were to be
generally adopted, conform strictly to the standard usages
of the parent language, ordinary English. It would be easy
to cut Basic English down towards 500 words, but then it
would depart from standard usage and at the same time the
strain of making the limited language cover the needs of its
users would increase prohibitively. On the other side, to
extend the
number of words beyond a certain point has many more
disadvantages than appear at first sight. I will be going into
some of these later; they need rather careful explanation.
Through 1928 this general problem was occupying Mr.
Ogden. It turned upon numerous technical points—
interconnected in a variety of ways—but essentially it was
a problem of common sense, a diplomatic or an
administrative problem, the balancing and ordering of
many rival claims—simplicity, ease of learning, scope,
clarity, naturalness—all to be as far as possible satisfied
and reconciled.
In the end three principles came out clearly. First, that
Basic English must be an all-purposes language and serve
trade, commerce, technical education, as well as news, the
diffusion of science, politics, general knowledge, and the
discussion at simple levels of all the common affairs of
man. Secondly, that it must conform to current English
usage. There must be nothing in it which would have to be
unlearned by those going on from it to a more complete
mastery of English. "If it is bad English, it is bad Basic"
was the watchword here. Thirdly, it was to be as limited in
vocabulary and as simple, intelligible, and regular in
syntax as is compatible with these other aims. What
resulted was the wordlist of 850 words and, more
important, the ordered system which restricted their uses
and idioms to a limited range. The research which gave
this result was an enormous labor of detailed
experimentation—largely the testing of various
possibilities by translation from ordinary English dealing
with all kinds of material, and used for all manner of
purposes. It is rather important to say that the Basic
English which was finally published was the language
which had proven its superiority—on the above
principles—after strict and full comparison with a great
number of other possible designs. It was not just a happy
idea or a first academic approximation. All the suggestions
for amendment which have been offered to us in the last
ten years are reversions to plans which were rejected on
detailed grounds during the process by which Basic
English came into being.
While this was going on I was Out in China as Visiting
Professor to the National Tsing Hwa University near
Peking.
If I may reminisce for a few minutes, that, I feel, will be
the best way to introduce both the chief application of
Basic English and some of the internal features in Basic
which make it so valuable. And then I can return to a more
detailed account of what Basic English is and how it
works, pass thence to some remarks about it as a teaching
method and its use as an introduction to ordinary English,
and finally to a sketch of its recent progress and present
position in the world.
Two things especially struck me about higher English
studies in Chinese universities—as they have struck, I
think, all English visitors who have been able to watch
them going on from the inside. The first was the diligent
harnessing of the heaviest and most complicated linguistic
carriages behind very undernourished horses. My students,
for example, longed to understand Henry James, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and, above
all, Marcel Proust, while, alas, they enjoyed only a hazy
perception of the duties of the English tenses, and solidly
resisted any temptation to employ them. The simple
present was good enough for them: 'Yesterday, I go . . . " and
so On. The conditional was a meaningless form to them. A
sentence like "If I had seen that, I would not have done so"
made no sort of intelligible unit for them. You may think
that fact added a certain mystery to the reading of Proust—
but what was one mystery among so many? In brief, these
students—and I am sure they represent very favorably the
students of our literature in all the linguistically remoter
parts of the world—were nobly aspiring to the highest
without even a modest competence in the elements. What
was true of syntax was true of every aspect of the
language. They had, in a sense, vast vocabularies, just
sufficient acquaintance with the most unlikely words to
mistake them thoroughly for one another. (In those days
the program of the middle schools aimed at giving middle
school boys seven thousand English words). As they
scrambled all the most difficult constructions beyond any
teacher's power to unscramble them, so they cross
fertilized all the species of English words which our
literary tradition struggles so hard to keep distinct. As to
pronunciation, the visitor's chief trouble in his early days
was to make any plausible guess as to what his students
were to say to him.
The other chief impression I had was of the
extraordinarily fine quality of these students' minds. I have
never met better minds anywhere. Once you realized where
they started from, and how little reasonable help or
guidance they had had at any point in their English studies,
there was no mistaking their ability. The best young
Chinese minds still seem to me the most indomitable
resolvers of clotted chaos and the most active creators of
intellectual order to be seen at work in the world. This
makes one anxious to aid them, if only in the interests of
our own descendants. For the hope of the peoples of the
Far East—and of all that a clear understanding between
them and the West in the future entails—must primarily
turn upon the improvement in the technique of their
English studies. I had not been teaching long in China
before I saw, as I could not possibly have seen in
Cambridge, what a place Basic English might and should
take there.
Now let me say in more detail what Basic English is,
what it is able to do, and how it does it. It is the most
necessary part of the English language, a part complete in
itself so far as it goes, but without any wall or division
between it and the rest of English. The line round Basic is
a teaching line—fixed by the question "What is to come
before what ?" Basic is a system of English words, and of
the way they are used together. It has been made as simple
and regular and clear as possible; and given the widest
general covering power without changing any English
forms or ways of writing or talking. I am talking in Basic
now, but I'm not going to keep to it for long here. There is
no good reason for using Basic in the place of a wider
English, when talking to anyone with a complete
knowledge of English; so I'll go back to a wider form of
English in another minute. My idea is to make you see that
Basic is not very different from everyday English—it is
only a limited English, not a changed English. The line of
division between Basic and the rest of English is put where
it is for reasons which have to do with the best and
simplest first steps in learning English. Now let me drop
the use of Basic and explain these reasons. It would
not be harder to give this fuller account in Basic—but it would
be longer and for you less interesting. You have to be an expert
to tell when a good Basic speaker is keeping within Basic and
when he is not.
There are two chief sources of error in learning any
language:
(1) Rivalry, and resulting confusion, with the native
language patterns. (2) Rivalry, and resulting confusion, between
the new language patterns while they are being acquired. Basic
was designed to guard against these two dangers by making the
new patterns as simple, regular, intelligible, and lucid as
possible. Let me now say what we understand here by lucid. A
sentence pattern will be lucid, in the early stages, if the learner
can actually see—in the meaning of a sentence which is being
enacted before him—a structure corresponding, one for one,
with the words in the sentence. For example, "I will give this to
you" is such a sentence. Each of the words has a distinct and
separate meaning in the total act (of giving) which is the
meaning of the whole sentence; and these elements are related
to one another in that meaning in a way which systematically
corresponds to the relations between the words. "1 will say this
to you" and "I will send this to you" have the same structure
and are equally lucid. So too with "1 will take this from you,"
"I will put this on him." All these are syntactically lucid
sentences, in this sense:
that the learner can actually see through the structure of the
sentence to the structure of the act which is its meaning, and,
reciprocally, he can see through the structure of the act to the
structure of the sentence which states it. On the other hand, the
sentence-pattern "I will give you this" is not lucid in the same
sense. It is a collapsed and transposed form, only properly
understood when the explicit form "I will give this to you" has
been so fully understood and so perfectly mastered that no risk
of confusion and indecision between them remains. I mention
it to illustrate a principle which has to be observed with the
greatest care throughout. We do not teach "I will give .you
this" until later, because we want to avoid all contaminations
of the major pattern by this variant; we want to avoid "I will
say you this" and "I will take you this," for example.
The most striking feature of Basic is its limitation of the
verbs to sixteen, with the auxiliaries may and will. That
restriction was the invention which made Basic possible and it
has various reasons. One of them is that, in those of their
meanings which should be learned first, these verbs offer
peculiarly lucid sentence patterns—in the sense I have just
explained. Twelve of them are verbs of simple bodily or
manual action—give, get; take, put; come, go; keep, let; make,
and say, see, and send. The other
four are do, have, be, and seem. Without these sixteen
verbs no acceptable form of English is possible. With the
twelve verbs of action you can demonstrate, as you teach
them, the simple meanings of the sentences you put them into.
You can do the act as you say the sentence and, what is more,
you can make the learner do the same. Thus you can lay a
really solid foundation in clear understanding of the meanings
with which these are taught first. That is one of the reasons
why this language is called Basic English. And actually this
understanding is the foundation, the basis, of all that follows.
I said that without these words no English is possible. On
any plan whatever for teaching English these words must be of
enormous importance. But the unique and distinctive thing
about Basic is that it recognizes how paramount their position
in English is. Not only are they strictly necessary in their
barest and simplest senses, but in their combinations with the
prepositions with other words in phrases they can, and in
ordinary English constantly do, take the place of other verbs.
The discovery of the extent to which other verbs can be
replaced without loss or change of essential meaning by
phrases containing
the Basic verbs was the discovery of Basic English. And I
should say here that this replacement of other verbs by the
sixteen was not a mere tour de force of ingenuity but the
recognition and full exploration of a peculiarity of English
which, as Jespersen and others have pointed out, is deeply
grounded in the history of our language. It is this alone which
makes it possible to do for English something that cannot be
done, to a comparable degree, for any other major language of
the world..
It is agreed that our verbs offer the chief difficulty to anyone
learning our language. To cut down the number of these which are
necessary is thus an evident gain. And if the necessary verbs are
also such that they can be taught—as to their first and central
meanings—through syntactically lucid sentences, that is another
advantage. But this drastic reduction to sixteen has, as a teaching
procedure, immense further advantages which perhaps only
teaching experience can fully bring home. With so few verbs, the
entire range of their uses can be examined in detail by the designer
of courses and textbooks. They can be clearly distinguished and
ordered. Those of them which are suited to the learner's needs and
capacities at every stage of his progress can be selected
systematically and given to him in calculated and controlled
installments. Those which are unsuitable can be detected and
postponed. They will be unsuitable because they are likely to
disturb the patterns which are slowly growing in his mind. All
success and security in language learning depends upon the
undisturbed growth of these patterns. The worst disturbers are rival
unconnected patterns which thrust in and confuse them. You can
only protect, foster, and confirm a growing pattern if you know
just what you are doing as a teacher. And you can only know just
what you are doing if the words you are dealing with are very few.
It would be quite impossible to apply the same critical examination
to or exert the same control over the multiple meanings of, say two
hundred verbs. You could not see, as you can with only sixteen,
which of their uses would be likely to upset or hinder the growth of
other patterns. In brief, you cannot really help a learner if you
allow him to attack the language on too wide a front. If you teach
him too many words at once~ you cannot give him the exercise in
using them that he needs.
This brings me to my next point. One of the greatest advantages
of the limitation of the verbs in Basic is that, in teaching, you are
incessantly using them. All your teaching is exercise in them. You
need no "special drills" to keep them up. Their explanatory power
is so great that from very early on you can employ what has
already been learned in elucidating
what follows. Thus the new advance confirms by exercise what
has been gained. Since the words are so few, their pronunciation,
and such things as tense and inflection, become clarified and
established as they can be by no other procedure. Moreover, and
this is a point which requires more insistence, the changes of
meaning which occur as they go into new combinations can be
observed and indicated in a sufficiently full and leisurely fashion to
avoid all confusions.
I have remarked already that we cannot do without give, go, take,
make, get, and so on, in English. Almost as little can we do without
such combinations as make use of, make an attempt to, go on doing, get
on, give up, take up, and scores of others. The understanding and use
of them is an indispensable part of even a very modest knowledge
of English. Yet some have seen in this an objection to Basic. It has
been said, for example, that it is easier for a student to learn the
verbs continue and improve than to master the phrases go on and get
on. These examples are not my invention. I take them from critics
who proposed to make this point with them. Will you, I wonder, be
as puzzled as I was by the use of get on as equivalent to improve ?
The suggested setting (on which, of course, everything here turns)
was an inquiry about an invalid at a hospital. "How is he getting
on?" "How is he improving?"' I felt, and still feel, that there is a
special flavor of determined or "improving" optimism about this
"improving." Compare too: "He improved his statement" and "He
improved in his work." The learner is bound to be equally puzzled
by "he continued his talk" when he finds that "he went on his talk"
is frowned on by his teacher.
But the point is this: Verbs like improve and continue are not
simple linguistic units, they are themselves very complex bundles
of tricks, and there is no time or spare energy in the early stages of
learning English to go into these tricks, sort them out into an
intelligible pattern, and see that they are properly learned and
learned in the right order. But there is time to do this for the few
Basic verbs and to do it thoroughly. And if we do it, the supposed
difficulties of mastering get on and go on vanish. But everything
depends upon how go, get, and on have
been taught and understood. We shoul4 start with their central,
obvious physical meanings, and teach them in syntactically lucid
sentences until they are deeply and unshakably understood. Then,
in the right order, we may introduce, with adequate illustrations,
the metaphoric extensions of meaning and the special contexts
which give rise to such phrases. We must drastically eliminate, in
these stages, the anomalous uses which are accidents of complex
linguistic history and keep only to those which support and
illumine one another. In this way, the teacher can be led to
appreciate the analysis and limitation of English idiom which
Basic has provided. There will then be no difficulty. This was
initially probable, and experience of actual teaching on these lines
does now, in fact, overwhelmingly confirm it.
A revealing indication of the backward state of current teaching theory is offered by these examples. Teachers in general are
ready to assert that one point of English is harder to learn than
another, regardless of the all-important questions: How has either
point been prepared for, and how can it be prepared for? There is
no such thing as "difficulty in the abstract." How difficult any step
is depends upon how it has been led up to. That is fundamental
throughout the theory of learning. To suppose otherwise and forget
the relevance of conditions is as if physicists should confuse mass
with weight. It is easy to learn to write if you can read and use a~
pen. Otherwise it is difficult.
I spoke a moment ago of the planned and deliberate use of
metaphoric extensions of meaning. It is through the study of and
critical employment of these that Basic contrives with 850 words
to cover so enormous a field of uses. But it must not for a moment
be supposed that Basic leaves it to the learner to invent and
experiment with these metaphors at random. The greatest part of
the labor of producing Basic did in fact go to the thorough
inventory of these metaphors, their analysis, the rejection of those
which are unsuitable, and finally their arrangement in an order of
maximum intelligibility and lucidity. Basic is not just a wordlist; it
is a clarified system of coherent uses of its words. The metaphors it
teaches are as carefully ordered as the constructions.
Corresponding, in fact, to the
principle of syntactic lucidity, by which it builds from the
transparent constructions to the less obvious variant or transformed
constructions, is an analogous principle of metaphoric
lucidity. The prepositions are the best field from which to
illustrate this—though the principle rules throughout. All
the prepositions, except of and for, have as their first central
sense a reference to position in space or direction of motion.
Their innumerable metaphoric uses are only intelligible if we
start with an adequate understanding of these central senses.
Take, for example, on. Its nuclear sense, which is always
present, is "touching." Usually it carries more than this. When
the book is said to be on the table, it is usually meant that it is over
and supported by the table. But consider the fly on the
ceiling. The ingredient "supported by" still lingers. Now
try "my finger is on the place"—"touching, spatial contiguity
with" is all that remains. Only by keeping a sharp eye on
these subtleties can we order the teaching of the uses of on in
an intelligible fashion, and make the learner see why they are
as they are. On no account must we let him have such things as
"on no account," "on view," "on his mind," "and so on"
before the earlier and more lucid uses are properly understood and
established and the chief differences, for example, between on, in,
and at have crystallized solidly and clearly in his mind.
The result of Mr. Ogden's analysis and arrangement of
these
metaphors is to be 'found in the little book The Basic Words.
The work there recorded is, in my opinion, the most sustained
and systematic study of metaphor which has yet been achieved.
It has applications far beyond the special problems of the
teaching of Basic, to the whole technique of the cultivation of
intelligence itself. For metaphor is no mere trick or figure of
speech. We too often treat it as a sort of scandal, as though in
using metaphor we were somehow confessing a deficit in
language. We should recognize instead that metaphor is the very
principle of thought itself—not its flower but its root. Indeed, the
best short description of what is unique about thought would
perhaps be to call it "metaphoric action." But to pursue that
would take us on a longer speculative voyage than is suited to
the limits of this paper.
In giving this sketch of the working principles of Basic and the
teaching procedures derived from them, I have been endeavoring
to indicate that Basic, for its designer, is more than a wordlist,
more than a short cut to a smattering of English, more even than an
international medium, a world language of affairs. It aims at being
an introduction, for all the intelligences of the planet, to the
language which best carries the human civilized tradition with all
its riches; and, moreover, an introduction which by its order,
method, and lucidity, will itself supply a sound training and
discipline for the mind. The ways and tricks of no language (except
perhaps mathematics) are entirely intelligible. There must remain
much that is mere accident of history and unintelligible brute fact.
But Mr. Ogden has shown, I believe, that the unintelligible part of
the first stages of English is far less in extent than anyone had
dared to suppose. His hope was that, in encouraging intelligence,
by making its tasks intelligible, you will make the learner more
intelligent. Trust the mind within its sphere of competence, and it
becomes more trustworthy. And of this anticipation I can, I
believe, bring actual classroom confirmation.
With this I pass to an outline of the history of Basic in China—the part of the world
in which 1 have chiefly been able myself- to watch it. Ten years ago, when the
experiences I have recounted took place, there were no Basic teaching courses, no texts
yet designed for classroom use. Only an account of the system and some specimens of the
language existed. That was enough, however, to interest some of the Professors of
English Literature at the universities, and it is these early converts who
- have carried through what has since been done. Plainly the junior middle schools, not
the universities, the twelve-year-olds just starting out on their English, not the
devotees of Shelley, Byron, and James Joyce, were the right point at which to set to
work. But for a while things had to wait. In 1933 the opportunity arose, the
Rockefeller Foundation made a grant for research, and a group was formed with
headquarters in Peking. The problem in China is in many ways unusually complex.
For one thing the Chinese language is devoid of syntactic patterns at all parallel to
those of English. You must do
without the help which such parallels afford with speakers of European languages.
Thus a very detailed study of the ,problem of translation from Basic into correct Chinese
colloquial and back again was part of the undertaking. In the end, something
which might be called "a direct method made reasonable"
was decided upon. Modern China, which carries practices
further
than we do, has developed two teaching methods to revealing extremes. One is known as
the translation method. The class gaze
at a text while the teacher explains at length in Chinese what it means. In the end he
succeeds admirably in telling the boys
what it would mean were they able to read it, but this
personally conducted tour of the reader does not teach them
to read. The direct method, on the other hand, gives them
no text but bombards them for six months with a stream of
incomprehensible English vocables. Six months almost
wasted, so far as I was able to observe. The theory is that
this will start their English for them in glorious
independence of their Chinese. But you do not annihilate a
language by. ignoring it, you merely renounce all control
over what the boys, aided by
dictionaries and friends, do with your efforts. As soon as a boy identified (as he
thought) a word he started his own private translation system. I well remember finding
one boy whose ears, being unhelped by his eyes, managed to amalgamate His, He is, and has. Thence, by a truly magnificent feat of syntactical imagination, he constructed a new
kind of word blending their functions. We had to disentangle this later for him; that is
how I know about it.
The plan we now follow gives them a text from the start,
and takes them, as they learn to read aloud and then recite
with closed books, to a point (at the end of six weeks)
where the words and sentences they know are sufficient
for nearly all the routine handling of the class business.
Thenceforward we can use a direct method. yearly all the
required explanation of new material can be given in the
English they have already learned. That is one advantage
of Basic. You can use English in class, but it is a fully
understood English (so far as it goes at each stage), not
something to be guessed at, most often
wildly. Thus we avoid teasing the boys with catches. You probably know the catch which
runs 'Time flies. We cannot. They are too irregular." A short account of the Basic direct
method would be to say that it cuts out this sort of thing.
But to return to my story. By 1936 things had moved far enough to justify a forward
step. By the help again of the Rockefeller Foundation, I went Out to Peking that summer.
By December the Ministry of Education in the Nanking Government took steps which led
to my rushing back to Cambridge for the Lent Term and returning with a Dispensation
from Duties to write a report for the Minister of Education. I got back in May, 1937. In
June the Minister called an Advisory Committee representing all schools of educational
theory, whose terms of reference spanned every aspect of the teaching of English in the
secondary schools of China. The Committee sat for the last week of June, and passed a
series of thirty-seven unanimous recommendations.
No attempt was made by the supporters of Basic on the Committee to urge its simple
adoption. It was felt by all that the Committee's business at that stage was with principles
rather than with products. Still the recommendations did embody all the main theoretical
positions which I have been advancing in this paper. For example, the vocabulary to be
attacked in the first year was cut down to 500 words, the principles of syntactic and
metaphoric lucidity were indicated, and the teaching of formal grammar and formal
rhetoric were abolished. Under the terms of the Committee's appointment the
development and implementation of these recommendations by the Ministry was assured.
A week later the guns at Lukouchiao postponed, perhaps for a decade, all further official
steps in this reform of English reaching in China.
Our own program, however, by no means came to an end. One of the
mysteries of China is the amount of work which can go on there
even amid chaotic conditions, and—thanks still to the
understanding and foresight of the Rockefeller Foundation—we
have in fact had two programs, one in the North in Tientsin, the
other in the far Southwest in Yunnan—the new home of the New
China. There, with the strong support of commissioner of
Education of the Province, teachers are being guided and classes
conducted in the hill temples to which the bombers
have driven them. The work in Tientsin has been
further preparation and the testing, through
selected classes, of the texts to be used in
Yunnan. As a result we are now satisfied that we
can in two years give a sounder and more
promising introduction to general English than
has formerly been given in six. By "a sounder
and more promising introduction do not mean, of
course, just an acquaintance with an equal
number of words. I mean an understanding and
command of the essential forms of English which
will allow the learner to go on, unconfusedly, to
whatever further uses of English he needs. He
will have as his aids The General Basic
Dictionary (in which 25,000 definitions are given
in Basic) and The Basic Science Dictionary (in
which 20,000 technical terms are similarly
explained). He will be in a position to use his
English in his other studies—whether in science,
history, philosophy or literature—with some
security that he really comprehends what he
reads. He will no longer—as I have suggested
is too often the case at present—be left in a chaos of linguistic
guess work from which advance is inordinately difficult. If this
reform were extended throughout China, there would be a
saving--on the Ministry of Education's figures at the outbreak of "the incident"—of
nearly a thousand million boy-girl hours on the course. For myself, I am not fond of such
statistics, but that much time can thus be found for further English studies— or for more
Chinese—there is no room left to doubt. But I am
more interested still in the improved intellectual quality of the work—the use of
elementary language learning to induce self-reliant thought and an active, not a
passive, spirit.
The other field in which I have watched Basic at work is the United
States, and here too an important aspect is the changed attitude and
heightened interest of the learners. We over here do not perhaps
always realize the scale of the problem of elementary English in the
United States or how necessary is an improved technique for its
solution. Over twelve million
BASIC ENGLISH 23
persons are—to use the expressive official phrase—' 'an the horizon of literacy."
This, of course, is due to the enormous immigration figures of the pre-quota era. In the
State of Massachusetts it is still the case that one person in every four is foreign barn.
(We have a similar condition in such a city as Winnipeg.)
The assimilation of these linguistic aliens is very slow and difficult in spite of great
efforts in many cases by the state authorities. Here Basic English was early
seen to offer a new hope. In 1935, Miss Mary Guyton, State Supervisor of
Adult Alien Education in Massachusetts, came over with a picked teacher,
Miss Anna Kelley, to study Basic with Mr. Ogden. As a result, Basic has since
then been used in the classes under her control (and in certain juvenile classes
also) to an extent only limited by a present shortage of teachers adequately
trained to follow its principles. This is a point of great practical importance. A
certain training, or re-orientation, is required if teacher and class are to take
full advantage of. the simplicities and lucidities of Basic. It is little good
ordering the steps if the teacher does not keep to the order, or if she throws in
at random—without realizing that they disturb the growth of the patterns—all
the constructions Basic has been at such pains to postpone.
This may, however, give a misleading impression. It is not harder to teach English
through Basic than through an ordinary first course. On the contrary, it is
easier. It is easier, I am told, to be a modern taximan than an old-school cabby.
But a brief spell of special instruction and training is desirable in switching
over. With Basic, this is short, it enlivens the intelligence, and it markedly
raises the teacher's status, in her own eyes. As we all know, the teacher of
elementary English tends to be a depressed member of the teaching
profession. This training problem, the certainty that very many more adult
classes in English will soon be enrolled, and the need therefore for more, and
more skilled, teachers, have in part been the reasons for the support given by
the Rockefeller Foundation to Basic English in the United States. Thanks to
this, work on many
aspects of this varied task is proceeding under the direction of Miss Charlotte Tyler in
New York. Specimens of these
aspects are: (1) In the examination which precedes naturalization, an inadequate
English is often a serious barrier to an otherwise
very desirable applicant. The naturalization authorities are
therefore interested in such things as accounts of American
History and of the Constitution written in Basic. (2) Radio corporations are asking us
for talks and trained Basic talkers.
(3) Telephone companies think that to put the directions for the use of the telephone
in Basic would lead to its wider use. (4) Foreign sales departments of, for
example, automobile corporations, are naturally interested in Basic. (5) "Safety
First" campaigns, endeavoring to keep more people from under the wheels of
automobiles, think that their advice and their slogans would be more effective if
they were more widely understood.
But above and beyond all special applications, there is a widespread feeling, which
grows clearer, that the maintenance of what may be called the English-speaking outlook
in political and moral traditions requires an English-speaking people, a democracy which
is linguistically united. And Basic is seen as a means by which this may be secured
without sacrificing the very valuable transplanted cultures of the foreign born.
I should not omit to mention—as an aspect of our American program—the very
special place which improved contact with Latin America has lately assumed. Politically,
economically, and culturally, Basic has a significant part to play in assisting "good
neighborly" relations between the United States and the states of
Central and South America.
In this paper I have dealt in some detail with those aspects of Basic English with
which I have been personally concerned, because the development of Basic as a world-
wide movement has been covered in literature which is readily accessible. The short
general introduction entitled Basic English contains an account, in Basic, of the
achievement of the past ten years, and a bibliography of more than a hundred volumes is
also available.
New centers have recently been established in India, where the State of Hyderabad has
adopted Basic as a foundation for
English teaching in its secondary schools; in Burma, where nine thousand learners will be
completing their course this year; and in Greece, where more than two thousand are now
being taught at the Institute of English Studies established by the British Council. The
system is being thoroughly tested on more than two thousand children in eighty-five
classes in the Copenhagen municipal schools, and adaptations of Basic are beginning to
appear in the chief European languages. Africa and Malaya offer immense fields for
further development.
Even those who do not proceed far towards a wider knowledge of English than Basic
in itself gives them, will find in it a medium which conveys to them the living thought of
the world. Science—both as a technique of thought and as a body of information—is
being gradually presented in a series of volumes which should eventually form an
Encyclopedic Library of General Knowledge; and a Basic version of the Bible is in active
preparation. . . . Such undertakings are evidence of the wide range of activities in which the
Orthological Institute is engaged. Its headquarters in Cambridge have now been supplemented by a research center in London, where the practical problems of Babel can most
conveniently be investigated. And the Babel inside the British Empire is surely alone
sufficient to make those problems a matter of primary interest, if not of grave concern, to
our educators and administrators.
As a closing consideration may I suggest that the naturally acquired predominance of
English over other languages puts upon us a special responsibility as to how it is taught.
It is the mother tongue or the administrative language of over six hundred million people.
It is the official second language in most of the great educational systems. It is the trade
language of the Pacific. It has become all this without any special efforts from us to make
it so. Basic offers us a new and unique means of maintaining and improving that
privileged position. We have lately found reason in all parts of the world to consider
whether we cannot and should not do more than before to see that English and the ideas
in the English-speaking tradition hold their place in the world.
-----
1 By Ivor Armstrong Richards, M.A., Litt.D.. Fellow of Magdalene
College;
Lecturer in English in Cambridge University; Director of Harvard
University
Commission on English Language Studies. Royal Society of Arts. Journal
(London). 87:735-55. June 2, 1939.
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