Private Reading.-No Reform teacher is worth his salt who does not aim from the beginning at giving his pupils a taste for reading privately for their own enjoyment and profit, and a foreign lending library is now an essential part of school-equipment. This requires much judgment and tact at the start. But as soon as Rapid Reading is well established in the Intermediate Stage the teacher will have little difficulty in discovering which pupils are ripe for private reading. As soon as the practice is fairly general it is a good plan to devote occasionally a whole class-period to the subject, the teacher going round the class to enquire how each pupil is getting on, make him talk about his book, etc. It is obvious that at first the book should be very simple, short, interesting and profusely illustrated. Les Livres Roses, published by Larousse, are very suitable for this early stage. I need hardly point out how invaluable this reading will be as a means both of strengthening and extending the command of the language. But by the time the Advanced Stage is reached Private Reading should form one of the teacher's most powerful allies in giving the pupils that cultural expansion which is our ultimate aim, and the awakening to which, in the better pupils, often takes place before the age of sixteen. It is then that each pupil will naturally adapt his reading, under his teacher's guidance, to his individual bias-literary, historical, scientific, artistic, political. Every school should take in one or more foreign weeklies or monthlies, and pupils who frequent the town public library will soon find their way to the foreign newspapers on view. I need only mention in passing the cultural value of lectures and theatrical performances in the foreign tongue. But next to

Private Reading, the most valuable expedient of all is one from which we are debarred in war-time, viz. a visit to the foreign country. Thanks to the Society for the Exchange of Children,1 this. is now within the reach of the humblest purses, and the results obtained. are often quite extraordinary, especially if children are sent abroad only when their pronunciation is secure and they are beginning to feel at home in the language. One of the most far-reaching of these results is the lasting friendships that are thus formed between the families of the exchanged children.

A brief reference must here be made to Translation, and the teaching of Grammar and of History. To take the last first, it is still very much an open question, and one which is exercising the minds of history and modern-language teachers, how far, on the one hand, the foreign history can actually be taught and studied in the foreign language, and how, on the other, correlation of the language course to the history course can best be achieved, though we are all agreed that some knowledge of the building up of the foreign nationality, of its outstanding epochs and individuals, is essential to our cultural aim. But there is still much divergence of opinion as to what is practicable. In many schools even the stage of experiment has hardly begun. The following points, however, are worth noting. The whole question, of course, is largely one of time and of teaching material. In a four to five year course all that can be done is to use to some extent, for Rapid Reading, texts illustrative of the history, and, in the second and third years, books specially written for this purpose, such such as Lady Frazer's and F. B. Kirkman's Elementary Texts 1 Secretary, Miss Batchelor, Bedford College, Regent's Park, N.W.

bearing on French History, L. Chouville's En Douce France, M. Poole's Lectures Historiques, R. Adair's Historical Reader, etc.

On the other hand, Specialists preparing for University scholarships in History, Modern Languages or both should have no difficulty in finding the time necessary to acquire, by private reading under the teacher's guidance, a real grasp of the history of the peoples whose languages they are studying. In French the number of excellent manuals published for French schools is of great assistance. But between these two extremes the possibilities are infinite. For further details I would refer the reader to H. L. Hutton's able and inspiring article, "History and the Modern Humanities," in the Journal of Education, Dec. 1915.

Turning to the subject of Translation, it must not be thought that because the use of the mother-tongue is barred in the assimilation of new material, the practice of translation from the foreign language is banished from the Direct Method course. On the contrary, it is welcomed as an occasional test of Sprachgefühl, a pleasant diversion from the usual routine, an essentially artistic exercise in which the pupil has the opportunity of proving that he has not only grasped the exact logical content of a given sentence but has received the right impression, has perceived the particular aspect of the idea presented.

We have only to apply the root principle of the Direct Method-viz. that the direct association is the

1 It is to be hoped that the new Advanced Courses, under Mr. Fisher's Bill, will encourage the combination of History and one modern foreign language as a special course of study, and that the University scholarship examinations will give it that recognition which is at present far from universal.

all-important aim-and the conclusion is obvious. No translation exercise must be allowed which would not conform to the definition "a translation of experience." It must consist in the translation of passages that are well within the pupil's range-i. e. that he understands in the foreign tongue and is in fact an exercise in English style, though incidentally a test of the pupil's knowledge of French. This kind of translation exercise may be practised from the first, but it must not be frequent in the Elementary and Intermediate Stages for fear of setting up the translation habit To give a very elementary illustration of the principle to be followed in such translation, a pupil ought not to have to translate "Quand il est l'heure de prendre le petit déjeuner, Paul descend l'escalier en courant," etc., if there is any risk of the literal English version intervening between the French and the corresponding mental representations, but only when the visualization of the French is so perfect that he says spontaneously in English, "When it's time to have breakfast, Paul runs downstairs."

It is obvious that in the Advanced Stage this kind of exercise becomes a most interesting and profitable form of final treatment for any passage that has been studied "intensively," e. g. by the process known as "Lecture Expliquée," or that has been particularly appreciated by the pupils, while its application to "unseen unseen" passages

is a convenient means of testing the range of our pupils' "passive" command of the language-a very necessary preparation for school-leaving and other examinations, where this kind of test must always play an important part.

As to translation from the mother tongue into the foreign, the same principle, of course, must apply as in translation from the foreign language. That means

that this kind of exercise must not be begun before the pupil has a very fair command of the foreign language, and would be able, so to speak, to produce the foreign version as an original free composition. It should be begun as late as possible, indeed I almost think it would be best to drop this test out of school examinations altogether.1 The more I teach, the more I realize the profound truth of Vietor's dictum: "Die Uebersetzung ist eine Kunst die in die Schule nicht gehört." The habit of direct association-i. e. "thinking in French"-must be firmly established, or the presence of the English words will begin to interfere. It is extraordinary how pernicious an influence this presence exerts, especially if the words are visible. The pupils will make mistakes that they never make when expressing themselves directly in the foreign language. That is why it is important to do the translation, at any rate at first, orally, without any English text in sight. The English should be hurled at the pupils rapidly, in complete sentences, so as to call up immediately the mental representation which is in its turn to evoke some foreign equivalent, the important thing being that this equivalent should be idiomatic, not exact; there should be, as it were, a headlong jump into the foreign language, whence a return is then made approximating gradually to the closest equivalent that the language affords.

1 It should, at any rate, have no place in examinations of the Senior Local and Matriculation type, and many teachers complain that the necessity of preparing their pupils for this test during the last year or two of the all too short four or five years course at their disposal is a serious obstacle to the development of Direct Association and the practice of Free Composition. In this connection the Cambridge Examinations Syndicate is to be congratulated on taking the lead (in their syllabus for 1918) in instituting a foreign language test in their Senior Local in which Free Composition only is demanded.