John Holt was a teacher and then a researcher in the sciences of education. He was a great advocate of autonomous learning and learning outside of school conceived in our traditional systems.

In his book How the child learns, John Holt devotes a chapter to language in which he wonders about how children learn to speak. He asserts that if we set out to teach (in the sense of teaching as in school), they would never know anything.

It Would Be A Failure To Try To Teach Babies Language.

How would caring educators go about teaching babies and young children to talk?

John Holt describes how expert pedagogues would go about teaching language to children (modeled on what has been done for teaching reading):

Suppose we decide that children need to be taught how to speak. How would we go about it? First, a committee of experts would analyze the language and break it down into several “language skills.” It probably sounds like, since language is made up of sounds, children have to be taught to produce all the sounds before they can be taught how to speak the language itself.

There is no doubt that we would list these sounds, first the easiest and most common, then the most complicated and rarest. Then we would record these sounds to the babies starting at the beginning of the list. It could be, in order not to disturb the child, that we do not let him hear a lot of innocuous speech and only expose him to the sounds that we would try to teach him.

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Next to the list of sounds, we would have a list of syllables and words.

When the child had learned to produce all the sounds on the list, he would be taught how to combine the sounds into syllables. Once he knew how to pronounce all the syllables on the list, he would begin to be taught the words in the order of the list. At the same time, he would be taught the grammar rules by which he could combine into sentences those words he had just learned.

Everything would be planned, with no place left to chance; there would be many exercises, multiple revisions, and oral interrogations to ensure that the child had not forgotten anything.

Parallel With Reading

For John Holt, the consequences of considering the teaching of oral language would be as catastrophic as that, which leads many children to reject reading and read poorly. He writes

Suppose we go into this: what would happen? Quite simply, most children would quickly feel confused, discouraged, humiliated, and frightened and would cease all effort to follow instructions. If they lived a typical child’s life outside the classroom, many of them would probably ignore our teaching and learn to speak independently. Otherwise, if our control over their lives were complete, they would retreat into deliberate failure and silence, as many do when we want to teach them to read.

How Does Language Come To Babies and Young Children?

According to John Holt, young children learn words last. He regrets that adults assume that since words are the most minor and most superficial elements of language, humans first learn to speak.

For John Holt, we first learn the overall idea of ​​communicating through language; we know that all these noises that come out of people’s mouths have a meaning.

Then, from the tone of voice and the context in which people are speaking, you get a very general idea of ​​what they are saying, the same way you might say in a country you don’t talk about the tongue if a parent is scolding their child, if people are joking or arguing, or if someone is giving an explanation or an order to someone else.

Then one begins to perceive the general idea of ​​the language’s grammar – i.e., its structure.

Only then do we begin to learn words and place those words in the right place according to the very crude grammar model that we have invented.

Recommendations For Autonomous Learning (Get Rid Of Pedagogical Intentions and Live Interactions)

John Holt makes some recommendations. According to him, adults should address babies and children as real people instead of speaking to them as teachers trying to teach them to talk. First, babies and children need to realize what language is for.

If a speech is dishonest, and there are no genuine feelings behind it, they will not see it as something they can or want to use themselves (and therefore, they will learn little from these kinds of interactions ). When we ge into our heads that children need to “learn” something, it becomes tough for us to have authentic, just living conversations that are part of normal relationships (and not pedagogical speeches and therefore not spontaneous “to teach”).

John Holt emphasizes that babies and young children like to hear adult conversations and often sit quietly for a long time just listening to them. If we want to help little children when they learn to speak, we can talk to them – provided we do it naturally, without any educational aim – and let them stay close to us when we speak with other people.

When the child had learned to produce all the sounds on the list, he would be taught how to combine the sounds into syllables. Once he knew how to pronounce all the syllables on the list, he would begin to be taught the words in the order of the list. At the same time, he would be taught the grammar rules by which he could combine into sentences those words he had just learned.

Everything would be planned, with no place left to chance; there would be many exercises, multiple revisions, and oral interrogations to ensure that the child had not forgotten anything.

For John Holt, we first learn the overall idea of ​​communicating through language; we know that all these noises that come out of people’s mouths have a meaning.