THE PEDAGOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF "PEELING THE ONION" AND "TEACHING EXCEPTIONS FIRST"

© 1996 by Orchid Land Publications

   This is discussed in Bailey, Variation in the data, and in other writings, most recently in chap.1 of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis. (The theoretical explication is set forth in the mini-essay on THE THEORETICAL PRINCIPLE OF "HOW FAR ABSTRACTION SHOULD REACH AND WHERE IT SHOULD STOP.")

     The principle simply says that students learning a foreign language should learn a fairly unmonitored style (just short of slang); for that is the style that includes (as subsets) all of the others on back to the most formal (i.e. most monitored). That languages are taught in the reverse order is manifestly wrong, since a formal style does not help you speak a natural, informal style. But if you begin with an informal style, you can delete a few rules (e.g. assimilations, optional word-order changes, etc.) to get to successively more formal styles. The reason is that the least monitored style includes the rules of the more-monitored styles.

     The principle, "Teach exceptions first," is not original with the author of this mini-essay; he can no longer determine who should be credited (I think it was Brooks in some article on teaching Latin). But over twenty-four years ago, I applied it to teaching Latin to high-school freshers. One taught the hard and irregular (one would today say "mark[er]ed") things first--e.g. the third declension and the third conjugation. (This is a pedagogical variant on P. Kiparsky's "elsewhere principle" of ordering regular forms after the exceptions.) It's very easy for students to pick up the regular things; if the irregular things have already been learned, there is no forgetting them.

     I have tried this with college freshman learning English as a foreign language. IT WORKS. The contrary instance is familiar to all who have learned a foreign language. One remembers one professor who had learned the pasts with "-ed" first but couldn't remember that "teached" didn't belong there. One should first learn the seven or eight weak verbs in which "-ought" and "-aught" replaces the nucleus and afterpart of the syllable of monosyllabic past forms. (I found that IT WORKS.) So with the French forms in -al that pluralize with -aux, the Italian forms in -go/a that pluralize with -ghi/e and those in -ca that pluralize with -che, and on and on.

     Incidentally, if students learned problematic forms together--e.g. corpus, opus, status, virus, etc. in Latin and comparable examples in Greek and German--they wouldn't say things like *corpi,*opi, *stati, *viri--if a plural existed for virus, a neuter, it would be virora--not to speak of monstrosities like *rhinoceri for rhinocerota and *octopi for octopoda. The nouns having gen. sg. in -en in German (they are, with the exception of Herz, masculine) should be learned first; otherwise, a problem like "teached" above arises.

     The principle of the hundred false friends is also valuable. If German students learned the difference between Kasse and cashier's window (not cash), kontrollieren and check up on (not control), and many more, how much better their signs would read! How many times in academic life one hears *was learning for "was studying"! 'Tis ineradicable.

      But the dictionaries mistranslate such words and will of course prevail because of the dictionary superstition, the belief that dictionaries are inerrant except for typos; how can it be otherwise in any country in which the dictionary standardizes/defines good usage? And how can teachers and students, despite years of acquaintance with English, avoid pluralizing information or teaching obsolete uses like "She was used to do that"? Language does not change in the eyes of the standardizer.

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