Page:Handbook of Irish teaching - Mac Fhionnlaoich.djvu/13

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HANDBOOK OF IRISH TEACHING.

been brought up in Ireland he will have recalled to him in the Irish language many of the facts of life as already known to him; while if he has been brought up in the large cities of his own land or outside of Ireland he will learn many things about Ireland that will be interesting and useful to him, and he will have assimilated his information through the medium of the Irish language, which he is learning all the time.

The subjective language, that is, the language which embodies our judgments upon external objects, is dealt with in a different, but equally effective, way. It is taught as class-room conversation, having reference to the work in hand or the immediate surroundings, and acquires a hold upon the minds of pupils as effective as does the language of the Series.

The inquirer is invited to compare the ordered sequence of the sentences in the following Series with the disconnected and chaotic phrases found in an ordinary phrase book, and he will have little difficulty in deciding that the Gouin arrangement of the sentences is a true psychological help to the acquirement of a language.

V. Grammar is taught in a new way and without requiring the student to learn off by rote a number of technical rules before he has any conception of how these rules are to assist him.

This has, as already indicated, a special value for Gaelic League work. Many of our students are simply incapable of mastering the complexities of grammatical rules. Some of them are too young, some of them are too old, and most of them are too uneducated, to study grammar effectively. By the oral method we