Il8 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



passed with them ; it was left behind when they emerged from childhood ; 

 it is very far removed from the adolescent, awkward, self-conscious 

 stage in which students from seventeen to twenty-one find themselves. 

 Conversation in the classroom is, therefore, not worth while. The hour 

 is short at the best. Many other and, contradictory as it may seem, 

 more ultimately practical things require attention. Oral prose com- 

 position, necessarily stilted and didactic, has to be the most practicable 

 substitute for what we call "conversation." 



Nevertheless, during the past few years I believe I have hit upon a 

 means which will stimulate the student to speak French, after having 

 first been made to think in French. The student has been made to 

 think in French, or at least to think in a Frenchified English, by means 

 of daily themes written in French, preferably in journal form as being 

 the form best adapted to make the person writing think subjectively. 

 Students in the second year of college French begin usually with a few 

 sentences each day of primitive, even puerile, ideas, written evidently 

 with more or less difficulty at the beginning; but within a few months' 

 time, most students in the course can cover a page of fool's-cap with a 

 very readable account of their daily thoughts and doings. After having 

 expressed themselves for a time slowly but surely with short sentences, 

 which have stood the test of the corrector's red-ink revision, they gain 

 confidence, expand, and reveal themselves almost as freely and well in 

 French as they would in English. They write about themselves, and 

 their own genuine psychic state is the impulse which spurs them on to 

 write. It is to a certain extent as if, being in France, they were com- 

 pelled to do their thinking in French. Having by this means become 

 proficient in the structural handling of the language, and having gradu- 

 ally and imperceptibly acquired a large and practical working vocabu- 

 lary of French words, the students are not far from understanding 

 spoken French with comparative ease, and yet ostensibly their work 

 has been only for the purpose of learning French composition. 



To sum up, then, when the time comes, the faithful student who 

 has learned to read, write, and pronounce French, will be able to help 

 himself in speaking French, and thus justify himself in the eyes of the 

 layman. He will be able to get along at least when the psychological 



