International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1931)

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-43» Psychologists have long known that the method of early learning has the most deleterious effects. Briicke, the physiologist, even speaks of " obliterated passages in the brain." (Cf. notes on the section " The Memory "). We shall see when we come to discuss questions of memorisation the special difficulties that arise from this source. It now remains to consider what part the film, and especially the talking film, can play in grammatical instruction. The film is a specially valuable aid to memory through its ability to differentiate effectively between styles of writing. It is only a short time since the entertainment film also began to aim at clarification through the style of writing and it is astonishing what effects can be obtained by this essentially simple process. The same method will prove very useful in the teaching of grammar. Suppose we want to teach the use of the French negative form " ne... pas. " One of the commonest mistakes made by foreigners is the omission of the " pas ", as if the negation were already sufficiently expressed by " ne. " In this case several short sentences or phrases will be thrown on the screen and, of course, discussed. The essentials — ■ the " ne " and the '.' pas " will be greatly enlarged: " Si nous ne sommes pas la! ", etc. Let us take an example from German grammar and choose what is probably the commonest error made by foreigners when they talk German. Every foreigner, of whatever nationality, will say " Wenn ich spreche mit Ihnen deutsch." That the verb comes at the end of a dependent clause is easily told and easily understood, but it is not at all easily remembered or observed. Here the talking film can help by emphasising at the same time the mistake and the correct position of the verb. The above clause, for instance, " Wenn ich spreche mit Ihnen deutsch " will be written slowly upon the screen in this wrong order of words. On the screen, however, words acquire life, even when written. They will engage in a hand-to-hand scrap with one another. The words " ich " and " mit " will fall upon the unfortunate interloper "spreche" and try and push it along to the end. This, it may be said, is game-playing; the point, however, is to represent the movement of the verb to the end of the sentence as vividly as possible and, since there is nothing inherently interesting in the rule itself, to introduce at least a light touch. If " spreche " thinks that it can place itself between ' mit ' and ' Ihnen,' it will soon find out its mistake, for these two will certainly not suffer the intruder, but will remorselessly urge ' spreche ' along its way until it reaches the end, when after some trouble we shall have obtained " Wenn ich mit Ihnen deutsch spreche." The words can now resume their normal peaceful aspect one beside the other. The clause will be left on the screen a few seconds, during which it will of course be orally repeated. During this time the word ' spreche ' will grow bigger and bigger, until we see it standing there in large impressive letters as the last word of the dependent clause. We said in our introduction that we needed the help of teachers and, as