This post originally appeared in Colin Gorrie’s Substack The Winged Schwa on October 4, 2024 with the title “How is a story about a talking bear supposed to teach me Old English?” Reposted here with permission.
People have often asked me – and it’s a fair question – “Why did you write a story about a talking bear?” Another fair question: “How is a story about a talking bear supposed to teach me Old English?” (I’ve omitted a few other common questions in this sequence, such as “Why not pick up a more normal hobby, like badminton?”)
Perhaps some of the same questions have arisen in your minds as well. This issue is my attempt to answer them, and to explain:
- How Ōsweald Bera came about in the first place,
- Why it takes the form of a story, and
- Why it is organized so differently from most textbooks – even from the book that inspired it? (e.g. Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata)
Coming as I do from a background in linguistics, I was aware of many of the themes of research in the field of second language acquisition. Even though it was not the area I specialized in – I was always more interested in linguistic theory in my own research life – I found many points of agreement between what I read from second language acquisition literature and what I had studied in the more theoretical end of linguistics.
The most important of these was the idea that knowledge of language is an extremely abstract thing.
It is abstract in that what we know when we know a language is not what typical language textbooks contain – explicit grammatical rules, charts of verb forms, generalizations about word order, and so forth.
These grammatical rules are accurate: they do describe the patterns of the language. But, as anyone with experience in a typical high school language class can attest, simply learning these grammatical rules does not seem to translate into knowledge of the language, at least not in any straightforward way.
Those language classes were something very different from our biology or science classes, where learning a collection of facts about the War of 1812 or the states of matter actually could let you apply that knowledge without too much trouble.
That is to say, learning a language does not seem primarily to involve accumulating facts about the language: you use the subjunctive after verbs of saying, you invert nouns after adverbs but not pronouns, etc. You can learn these, and even repeat them back on command if you’re an especially keen student, but you can do all of this without much benefit to your ability to read, write, and speak the language.
One idea that has been rolling around in various guises in second language acquisition research is that this abstract system of knowledge grows rather like a plant. With plants, you need only supply them with enough of the raw materials – water and sunlight – and the growth happens without your having to do anything in particular. With languages, comprehensible input stands in for water and sunlight.
Simply put, comprehensible input is language used to communicate with learners at a level where they can understand the message, even if they don’t understand every word perfectly. The idea is that, with enough of this input, the terribly abstract system of implicit knowledge that is language builds itself.
I wanted to see this process in action for myself. Of the languages I was interested in, Old English seemed the best candidate: it’s closely related to Modern English, which lowers the difficulty level overall, and reduces the barrier to entry. There’s also a healthy demand for learning it (so I’d be able to find some students), but there wasn’t much good material aimed at learners, as there is, say, for Latin.
I was also inspired by Hans Ørberg’s book series Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata (LLPSI), which is an excellent book written along compatible lines – it provides lots of Latin input for learners which it does its best to make comprehensible. And it does a very good job at this.
The writing of LLPSI predates ideas about comprehensible input, and there are certainly differences between the ideas about language learning assumed by LLPSI and the ideas I wanted to test (more on that later in this issue!), but LLPSI as a text is by far the easiest to use as a learner or teacher who wants to incorporate comprehensible input into their practice.
I think everyone who has learned or taught Latin with LLPSI comes away saying “I wish we had an LLPSI” for whatever language they want to learn or teach next. I was no different. That’s more or less how Ōsweald Bera began too: “what if we had an LLPSI for Old English?”
Ōsweald Bera is born
When I started work on making the “LLPSI for Old English”, I soon realized that cleaving too closely to the design of the original LLPSI was actually inconsistent with the hypotheses I wanted to test. The biggest difference is that LLPSI is organized around a grammatical progression: each chapter introduces a new class of nouns, a new verb tense, or some other new grammatical concept.
I didn’t want to do this.
Why? A consistent finding in second language acquisition research is that language development proceeds according to stages which appear to be universal to all learners of a given language.
But these stages are not straightforwardly applicable to the design of a curriculum for two reasons: (i) individual learners vary in how quickly they move through these stages, and (ii) these stages do not correspond to what a language teacher might consider the different “topics” to be covered in a language class. Instead, they look like this example, drawn from the acquisition of English negation:
Stage 1: Use of invariant no in front of a phrase, e.g., No book.
Stage 2: Invariant no or don’t used sentence-internally, e.g. He don’t like job.
Stage 3: Correct negation of modals and auxiliaries (e.g. can, will) in contracted form, e.g. I can’t play.
Stage 4: Correct negation of auxiliary do, e.g., She didn’t believe me.
(adapted from VanPatten et al. 2019: 64)
[incidentally, this example is drawn from an excellent introductory textbook on second language acquisition; if any of you are curious about the topic, VanPatten et al.’s book is a good place to start]
It’s not feasible to keep a learner in a given chapter until they have acquired the grammatical topic covered by the chapter. To organize a textbook along these lines betrays an understanding of language as a collection of grammatical facts to be learned explicitly one after another – exactly the opposite of the conception of language the project was meant to assume.
So I needed a different plan. What I alighted on was this:
I wanted to take students through a lengthy Old English story whose vocabulary level began with only a few concrete words and simple sentences, and progressed gradually to something approximating the complexity of prose and richness of vocabulary of authentic prose texts.
The book wouldn’t teach grammar explicitly, or even organize its chapters around grammatical topics. Relatively quickly, readers would encounter the full range of grammatical features of the language, without having a chapter dedicated to explaining “the subjunctive mood” or “the genitive case”. Then, simply because a writer inevitably ends up using something like the full resources of a language’s grammar in writing basically anything, the reader will encounter every verbal tense, every noun class, every adjective inflection, over and over again throughout the book. This constant encounter with grammatical forms would then fuel the acquisition of the implicit grammar, given enough time.
And that phrase “given enough time” brings me to the one other thing I wanted to do with the book, which I had not seen done with great success in pedagogical material before: I wanted to make it something interesting to read even if you weren’t trying to learn Old English.
In other words, I wanted to make a textbook that was a page-turner. If I wanted students to acquire the language, I had an obligation to make them want to spend the number of hours necessary in order to do that. Even though one book would not do the whole job, I could perhaps bring them to the point where authentic texts could be comprehensible to them – this would still take many many hours of time spent with the language. Either way, a boring book would not suffice.
That’s what I set out to do – time will tell if I have accomplished it.
And that’s what we’ll be talking about in the next issue of The Winged Schwa: how do you structure and plot a story – and bring a delightfully adventurous bear to life – when you have the ulterior motive of teaching people a language?
To get updates on Ōsweald Bera please subscribe to Colin’s Substack The Winged Schwa and sign up for ALI’s email list below.
Additionally, we would love to have you learn Old English with us. The two-course beginner sequence reads the entirety of Ōsweald Bera and discusses it in spoken Old English, in preparation for extensive reading of primary sources in the Intermediate courses, and then a three-course Advanced sequence reading Beowulf.
