Learning foreign languages with the verbo-tonal method

The verbo-tonal method also applies to the learning of foreign languages. How does it work?

The learning of foreign languages

What speech can they acquire, when the only communication they know is that of violence and suffering? It is known today that the way out is the most difficult for these children. It follows that the optimal conditions for speech — or rather the preconditions — are found not in the organ of hearing, the ear, but in the affective environment. This handicap, which embraces a very high number of children, presents itself as a handicap of society. Human rights extended to the rights of the child will have a human and social content on the scale of the most elevated of human rights.

To arrive at a harmonious communication, it is necessary first of all that people understand one another, and not only within the family; there must also be understanding between people speaking different languages. In the domain of the learning of foreign languages, the verbo-tonal method is centred above all on this person-to-person communication through spoken language. It is for this reason that the SGAV method, elaborated with Professor Rivenc, places the emphasis on situations of everyday life and on understanding through the proposed context.

To address the problem of poor pronunciation, I set myself the fundamental question: how do we perceive the sounds of our mother tongue and, in general, the sounds of language? Can every person learn any language whatever? A capital experiment in our theory has shown that each vowel, if filtered through the various well-defined zones of frequency bands, is transformed into different vowels. Each vowel therefore contains all the vowels. Likewise each consonant, in principle, contains all the consonants. For each sound, there is an octave essential for its perception.

There is a very widespread erroneous idea, namely that there are peoples who are handicapped in learning a foreign language. We have advanced the hypothesis that the adult pronounces badly because they listen badly. The brain does not use all the frequencies of the sounds sent through the ear, but makes a selection among them. It seems that over the years each individual uses their mother tongue as a natural filter when perceiving sounds. That is why all the French make the same types of mistakes when they speak English, and the Japanese have their types of mistakes, which differ from those of the French.

It suffices to realise that children of any nation whatsoever born abroad learn any foreign language whatever just as the children of the country do. The same is true of pupils in any country who begin to learn a foreign language in a kindergarten with a good teacher. The results are excellent and rapid. Even later, from the age of nine and until puberty, pupils have the possibility of acquiring a foreign language correctly. After the age of puberty, the acquisition of a foreign language is far more difficult, because the brain has reached the stage where the mother tongue directs perception.

In fact, when an adolescent hears badly and pronounces badly the sounds of a foreign language, they are defending the listening system of their mother tongue. We have already underlined that in each vowel there are all the vowels and that in each consonant there are all the consonants. Evidently, a brain that has reached maturity selects from this richness of sounds the phoneme of its mother tongue. In the domain of learning foreign languages, one must also start from the optimum. The best optimum is the young age, up to nine years old, then up to puberty.

When puberty has been passed, one must have not only teachers who speak a foreign language well, but who know how to correct the pupil’s errors by acoustic optimum, in which rhythm, intonation and the situation come more particularly into play. It is neither by the large number of isolated words that one learns, nor by the mass of grammatical rules without situations, that one can arrive at a good knowledge of the foreign language. For by such a route, we are in contradiction with

the procedures of acquisition not only of the mother tongue but of a good acquisition of any foreign language whatever. The research carried out at the École Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud on basic French has conveyed its important message to linguists the world over; the research carried out for other languages in other countries has, for its part, likewise proved that we do not communicate by a high number of words, but by situational, intonational and bodily structures that enrich the meanings of each word.

In applying these ideas to the necessities of the present epoch, in which the European Community is being created — which soon, let us hope, will be greatly enlarged — one must be more than bilingual; one must be multilingual. How shall we arrive at that? By the optima. On the one hand by the optima of age; on the other, when the age of 9, 10 or 14 has been passed, by the procedures bearing on the optimum of sounds and the optimum of communication: namely the situation, the rhythm, the intonation and the body as a whole. It is evident that one must begin with the spoken language, which will then be followed by writing and the written language.

But there are also other problems when one seeks to have a foreign language learned, especially when one addresses larger populations. Let us consider the use of French and its diffusion in francophone countries. How does Creole present itself — which includes at once elements of French and elements of the local soil? It is a structured language that serves communication, although its use is limited to a part of the archipelago. As the population of such a region lives it as their mother tongue, it would be neither just nor linguistically acceptable if one sought to eliminate it artificially or by force.

But to permit broader communication of these populations, everything must be done so that French becomes their second language. It would be unjust to deprive populations communicating in Creole of the practice of the French language, which is a world language. But another problem arises when, alongside Creole,