Leontiev, A. A. Psychology and the language learning process. Oxford: Pergamon, 1981. 159 p.
Chapter 2
Psychological aspects of
personality and activity
1. The problem of person lity
The concept of personality has existed in psychology almost from the
moment it emerged as a science. However, this concept has been
interpreted in a variety of ways, often unacceptable'from the point of
view of Marxist-Leninist psychology.
True, psychologists of sharply contrasting trends are unanimous in I
affirming that personality is something integral; it is .not simply a
cluster of mental qualities, properties, or tokens, but rather their unique
and unrepeatable combinaJion characteristic of efich individual.
Psychologists do also agree that in the last analysis it ~s precisely, p'er-
sonality which determines the concrete behaviour of fi given man, his
discrete thoughts and deeds. The famous nineteenth-century psy-
chologist, William James, descrjbed personality r~ther well as the
'master' of mental functions. But. what lies at the basis of this integra-
lity? What makes it the 'master' of man's mental life? Psychologists
answer these questions in different ways-hence the vari"ous irrecon-
cilable approaches to the concept of personality.
Right at the start, it must be pointed out that the view which equates
personality with individuality is patently mistaken. Certainly all men
are unique in the sense that each has his own innate attributes, which
precondition the development of his ,personality. Where one m'an has
an excitable nervQus system, another will have a quiet one; ope will
have quick reactions, another slow; one will be blessed with perfect
pitch while another has a so-called 'eidetic' visual memory (i.e he can,
as it were, see in his 'mind's eye' a scene which he is asked to remember,
and can describe it down to the minutist detail), and a third will have
an exceptionally fine sense of smell. Of course, on top of these attribu tes,
each man has his own individual experiences (not to mention the socio-
historical experience absorbed by every individual), and in every case
these are different. However similar the education and the demands
made on people by the society of which they are a part, each man takes
from society something specific, fails to come to terms with some of its
aspects, or absorbs others more deeply and strongly. And, of course, the
demands made on its members vary (rom society to society, from epoch
to epoch, and from culture to culture. Can 'we reconcile all these
individual characteristics with the concept of personality? Intuitively
, we all understand that personality is something different, that to some
extent, of course, it determines man's individuality (and in turn de-
pends on individual characteristics), and yet differs from it.
Frequent attempts are made in modern bourgeois psychology to
approach the concept of personality empirically, and to define it by
objective definition of de of its individual traits (usually by means of
special tests) and then by the search for statistical links (correlations)
between the data of these 'personality' tests. It is undoubtedly possible
to isolate particular aspects of personality in this way, above all for
practical purposes, for instance if one needs to establish the professional
suitability or unsuitability of a person for a certain type of productive
activity. But for the time being no one has succeeded in 'plotting'
personality on the strength of test results, and clearly no one ever will.
It is like the well-known game of 'twenty questions', where it is only
possible to guess what object (or which person) the other player has in
mind: the object or person could not be exhaustively defined by means
of the limited number of questions and answers. Incidentally, the game
of 'twenty questions' is in some ways better than testing, because in it
we always start by asking wide, essential questions, and only later
contract them into precise and concrete queries. But in testing, un-
fortunately, it is completely unclear what place in the structure of
personality should be given to the characteristics we have isolated.
(Running ahead a little, I should specify that on the whole they do not
characterize personality so much as activi (y.)
However, all this does not mean that testing in general is unnecessary; I
am on]\, saying that this method will hardly lead to a psychological
 grasp and definition and interpretation of personality as the major
factor in man's mental life and activity, determining all his individual
distinctive features. One and the same characteristic or peculiarity may
be of vital importance to a personality, or it may not. Having stated
that a given man has a talent for engineering, or is a conformist-that is
to say, he is easily swayed by the opinions of others-we have not in
fact learned anything ",bout the man himself. All we can do it to make a
fair assumption, with a good c 6.nce of being right, about th~ way he
will behave in a given situation:But even then some other aspect of his
personality might emerge as being more significant in that situation; for
instance, we can say that he is easily swayed if a disagreement does not
concern a vital issue, but that'he will stand firm ifhe feels that his own
convictions are under attack.
Nor can one simply explain personality as the product of the 'equally
influential' effects, on the one haT)-d, of innate heredi~ary psycho-
I differe~t ways; it determines his actions and compels him to move in to
physiological characteristics, and, on the other of environment'and
cuI ture. Of course personaiity takes shape as the r~sul t of absorbed s~cio-
historical experience, and on the basis of innate preconditions; b~t one
does not end up with personality just by adding the two together, just as
one does not end up with steel by simply mixing iron ore with carbon.
What processes take place in tqe 'blast-furnace' in which man's per-
sonality is smelted, an,d what should the steel worker-the secondary
school teacher-known about these processes?
2. Activity and its structure
The most important element in defining man's personality are the social
relationships into which he enters, and of which he is both the subject and
the object. Man enters into these social relationships through his
activity.
When we speak of activity, we do not intend it as a synonym of 'be-
haviour' as, for instance, the behaviourists understand it. For the
behaviourist, man is, in effect, an automaton, albeit a very complex one.
Like any automaton, he 'switches on' when external forces somehow
exert an influence on him, by pressing a button, inserting a coin, or
intercepting a ray leading to a photo-electric cell. As soon as such
influence is exerted, man starts to 'behave', to act in some way, and to
react. Of course this influence need not be direct and immediate, and
the influencing factor or stimulus itself need not necessarily have physi-
cal reality-it might be verbal, that is, it might take the form of a sign.
Sometimes we can introduce into this scheme the notions of motive or
necessity;. the motivation of man's behaviour can be 'built into' his
m, ,ltal make up and considered as yet another stimulus, whether innate
or acquired, with indirect behavioural effects.
But in every case a general principle remains true; on the one hand, we
have a man 'as such', a self-sufficient personality, a little closed world, a
being who simply 'adjusts' himself to other people, to society, to the
. surrounding world of objects. On the other hand, there is all of that
world (including other people), which influences man in a thousand
the direction which will make it easier and more comfortable for him
to respond to future stimuli.
But it is possible to consider man's actions and thoughts in a different
light, as Soviet psychology does, and this is how I shall proceed in this
book. This concept of activity may be expressed in three fundamental
propositions :
(a) A man's activity is always material and significant. Man does not X
simply 'behave', nor does he simply perform abstract deeds: anyone of
his actions constitutes at the same time an interaction 'with objects
outside himself, and it can influence or alter them (we shall see below
that this can sometimes extend to an influence on other people). There
is no man who simply 'acts': there is man, and there is that which he
affects or influences. There is no abstract subject of activity: in activity
there is always an object as well as a subject, and the character of the
interaction arising between them depends no less on the object, if not
indeed more, than on 'the subject. The qualitative characteristic or
psychological content of an activity can be of many kinds. The first
place is held 'of course by productive, working activity. But other forms
are possible, as, for instance, cognitive activity, which is of particular
I-----~-----------~-------~_-
interest to us; in reality this is an activity which is directed not at the
objects and events of the external world but, thrbugh them, at the very
subject of the activity. But it is important to stress th'1t tI~is activity is
also not a mere process of 'drinking in' some sort of external informa-
tion; a necessary condition for cognition is active interaction with its
objects, and only as a 'ricochet' do we' come back to the subject of the
activity. It is precisely for this reaso , thatQD_~.sJ!C?..JlldJ!ot..te~il
a foreign language ifhe is going to ve no opportupity tQ~akjt.
,
(b) Man's activity is primarily social and embodies his social r~lation-
ships. It is never the activity' of a given concrete individual, considered
separately from, society; and it only emerges as material and meaningful
action rather than a mere manipula~ion of things (as'in Krylov's fable
of the Monkey and its Spectacles) when its social, objective necessity
becomes manifest, and man shows the socially elaborated prerequisites
necessary for that action. Let us take, as a,n example of working activity, :
the bricklayer. He is building a house, not merely cementing bricks-
and that house is needed by people, by society. Th.e'sort of edifice he
constructs and the way in which he cements the bricks is also deter-
mined by society, and society inch.)des a special grpup of people (archi-
tects and builders) wl:J.oseworking activity it is to make models offuture
buildings which will satisfy social needs as well. as possible. Our worker
would not even be a bricklayer were it not for the fact that society-h~s
elaborated a system of professional requirements for his work and
systems for teaching the necessary habits and skills, ifit had not taught him
how to perform that specific activity. Furthermore, it has provided him
with bricks and mortar and with his working tools-his trowel and plumb.
This applies not only to material labour, as in the bricklayer's case, but
to any activity, including that which seems to be totally isolated from
society. For instance, the theoretical physicist sitting at his desk would \
seem to be operating with completely abstract entities, because of
internal cognitive imperatives. But if we examine his activity carefully,
we shall understand that it hardly differs from that of the bricklayer.
The problem which he is solving may not have any immediate practical
relevance; but what is physics, ifnot a science which helps man to make
sense of the world of objects surrounding him, the perfect practical
__ I------~~ -_--I
activity and make it more expedient and fruitful? Our physicist thinks
logically-but the laws of logic, as Lenin noted, are simply the results
deposited in our brains by the practical actions of millions of people. He
uses physical concepts and a mathematical apparatus, but did he invent
them? Why did he become a physicist rather than an alchemist, an
astrologer, or a specialist in black or white magic? All these specialized
pursuits have, we know, existed in the history of mankind. And did he
become a physicist all by himself?
There is, however, another no less important aspect to this question. All
bricklayers, when they are working, have the same aim-to build the
houses and to fulfil their work target for the day. But,here is a brick-
layer who has hired himself out in order to earn a living, and here is
another who is a member of a work-brigade and an active and public-
spirited citizen. Clearly their motives for what is apparently one and the
same activity will be different, as will their attitude to their work and
thf' psychological content of their activity. A different system of social
reL!Lionships is expressed in their superficially similar work.
(c) Man's activity has a systematic structure-we have seen this in the
precedipg analysis. Let us start by saying that it is characterized by
motive \and aim. Both are prescribed to man by society, and both have
"a ma terial character. Even when the aim of my activity is the satisfac-
tion of my natural needs-hunger or thirst, say-those needs have to
acquire the form of a concrete object in order to become the propulsive
force of an action. I do not just want to eat, I also have in front of me the
image of the food which is capable of satisfying my hunger, the image of
a piece of bread or meat; but that piece of bread does not exist outside
society, with its mills, bakeries, and bread shops. This is all the more
true of more complex forms ofactiviry.
The motives of an action as embodied in its aims can be very different,
as we have already set"l in the example of the bricklayers. This differ-
' ence can be shown in lhe educational field as well. For instance, all
schoolchildren can master a foreign language to a more or less,similar
degree of competence. Their aim will be one and the same-to learn the
language. But the propulsive forces, the motives for their cognitive
activity, are certainly not the same. For one, the motive will be to get
top marks in his examination, leave school at last with a gold medal,
and be accepted by an institute of higher education witho~t having to
sit entrance examinations. Another will want to get the same top marks
in order to impress his teachers and parents by being a 'good boy', 'an
outstanding pupil'. A third will want to prove to himself that he is no
worse than the rest, that he is no less clever and capable (a very frequent
and effective motive i~ adolescen ~). A fourth wants to b.e able to read
the literature of a given languag -fluently in the original. True, in the'
process of mastering the language all these motives are sometimes com-
pounded, or even reduced by interest in the subject itself, the activity
becoming cognitive not only in view of its goal, but also on the stre~gth
of its motive. Psychologists call this occurrence, 'transition from motive
to aim'. Such activity is always particularly effective, and any language
teacher knows how important it is for the success of his teaching to make
mastery of the language not a compliance within a tedious obligation,
but the additional or even fundamental 'intrinsic propulsive force' of
the cognitive activity of the learners.
The correlation between motive and aim of an action alters man's
attitude towards the content of the action, towards the 'aim, and to-
wards the outcome of attaining such an aim-the product of the action.
In Soviet psychology it is customary to talk of man's 'personal meaning'
-of his activity and of the objectives embraced by it. The personal
meaning for a foreign language learner will be dissimilar in the four
instances I have described.
The structure of activity cannot be reduced merely to the correlation
between aim (product) and motive. Activities directed towards attain-
ing one and the same aim and impelled by the same motive can be
organized in different ways; let me note in passing that this organiza-
tion, despite all its possible variations, is usually expedient; man acts in
such a way as to attain his goal by the best possible means and avoid
unnecessary expenditure of time and energy.
Firstly, the final goal cannot as a rule be attained immediately, but
rather in consecutive steps. No activity as a whole is completed when
the nearest intermediate result is obtained (top marks in the examina-
tion, for instance). Such completion is attained only when the motive is
satisfied and the student has been accepted by some institute of higher
edu'cation with exemption from the entrance tests. The integrality of an
action as a psychological unit of behaviour is determined by its motive.
But before completing such activities, man sets himself a consecutivc
series of intermediate aims; once one has been achieved, he moves on to
the next one, but retains all along the sense of the general motive which
is guiding and directing his actions. These intermediate goals, as it
were, break up his activity into an aggregate of separate actions, which
are also psychological units, but of a lower order in relation to the
overall activity, since they are always subordinated to it and defined by
it.
When people are acting together, it is possible to dis tribu te the actions
uuween the various participants in the activity. When prehistoric
pe<?ple hunted mammoths together, they had a common motive-the
need for food, 'reified' in the mammoth-and a common aim deter-
mined by this motive. Each of the pursuers carried out his separate
actions, even though the results of none of these actions taken singly
could satisfy the individual's need. Only the product of the joint
activity-or, to be more accurate, that part of the product which he
would receive-could satisfy his need: and that part was determined by
the character of the social relationships in the primitive working
collective. Other examples can be adduced which would be closer
to school practice: the joint efforts of students in producing a wall-
newspaper or staging a play, or working in the school garden, etc. In
such cases, only the product of combined actions is capable of satisfy-
ing the students' needs, which function as a propulsive motive for their
activity.
But an action may in turn be completed in very different ways, depend-
ing on the concrete conditions and on the material situation in which it
is being carried out. If activity may be correlated to motive and action
to aim, then operation may be correlated to conditions. This simplest
psychological unit of activity is subordinate to action, and therefore in
turn to activity as a whole. Actions identical in content may have
__ --- ~----------
different formal structures; the operations involved in opening a locked
door depend on the number 'of locks, the way they are made, and on
whether the door opens away from you or towards you, or whether it is
hung from the left or the right side of the doorway,
The correlation between activity, actions, and operations is dynamic.
Operations can at first be directed towards a conscious aim, i.e. be
actions; they then becom.e automati ..
and vanish from man's conscious-
ness. There is, however, another typ~of operation, which emerges as the
result of unconscious adaptation and probing for the right way to act.
On the other hand, an action may again become cons~ious if in carry-
ing it out one comes up against difficulties. A pupil may automatically'
write a word correctly; but if he has forgotten how to spell it, he will
need to pause and try consciously to make use of the spelling rules he
knows.
In the formation of any type of activity, i.e. in the teaching of it, there
always takes place an 'increase' of the units of psychological activity;
what was a sequence of actions. becomes one action, a ~hain of opera-
tions; and separate, indep'endent activities become attions and merge
into one single activity, : '.
3. Personality and motives of a~tivity
Man's personality is not defined by the separate activities which he
carries out, by his concrete aims, and isolated deeds. At the basis of his
personality lies a system ofmotivesfor his activity.
Let us recall our four schoolchildren. One can state that their per-
sonalities are different, because one and the same activity is approached
from different angles and holds a different place in the general system
of activities which they carry out. That which for one is central to the
system and determines his lifelong behaviour, may be of little impor-
tance to another, and remains subordinated to other motives which he
deems essential. Besides social activity-motivations, such as the desire to
be useful to society; besides motives of a cognitive order ('I want to
know more and be more skilled'), older schoolchildren may also have
I_~ ----
motives of the type 'I want to earn good I:Iloney and buy a Japanese
tape-recorder'. If such motives gain guiding pre-eminence theo/ deform
the personality and lead it towards a one-sided and unnatural develop-
ment.
But what determines this system of motives and their hierarchy in the
structure of personality? Have we not come to the idea of an innate
hasic set of needs to be satisfied by a system of activities?
No, because these needs take shape and change in the course of man's
activities in society. A man may, for instance, have a literary talent and
write good verse. But if he operates in conditions in which th~ creative
urge is subordinated to other motives, utterly alien to true creativity, his
writing may become only a way to success and prosperity, and this
would lead to a degradation of the very need to create and to. his self-
annihilation as a poet. The first bricklayer mentioned above would
certainly find satisfaction in the actual work process and in the fact that
he was bringing happiness to other people by his efforts, so long as his
f' working activity took place in conditions favourable to the completion
of the work; but in a society in which he is compelled to subordinate
these motives to concern about his daily bread, it may well be that they
will never even take shape in the structure of his personality.
\'
When a child's personalit\ is being formed, a great deal depends on the
motives which condition the activities of the adults surrounding him
and on the motives and aims set for the child. In a family where every-
thing is subject to the striving for material wealth, and where the child
gradually comes to regard this as a guiding motivation, it is necessary
to redress the situation by active social intervention, above all from the
school. Generally speaking, the basic content and tasks of education are
not to impose on the child a set of prescribed truths; these may be
acquired, but will not become the real basis for the formation of per:..
sonality. The task of education is rather to determine the structure of a
child's personality through motives objectively significant to society
because they are the fundamental propulsive forces for people's
activities in that society. The child must be taught to evaluate his)
behaviour, and that of others, against the yardstick of their motives; and
 I__~ --J

20 Psychology and the Language Learning process

Chapter 3
it must come to consider them an inalienable part of personality and
convert them into deep moral convictions.
Speech and communication
I need scarcely point out the role which the teacher's personality can
and must play in fulfilling this task.

1. Speech activity
The preceding chapters have attempted to show that Soviet psychology
treats man's behaviour not as a passive state (as does, for example,
American Behaviourism), but as a dynamic and purposive activity.
This approach is extended by Soviet psychologists to their views on
speech.

Ac a rule man does not produce speech responses to external acts; in a

tYl,ical case he will perform a speech act directed towards some non-
verbal aim' or towards the solution of some practical or theoretical
problem facing him. When we find ourselves in an unfamiliar foreign
town, we need the foreign language most of all in order to find our way
around the town, make a purchase, and obtain in a cafe or restaurant
the dish we want to eat, etc. A student learning a foreign language in a
technical college will in the future have to read specialist literature in
that language, that is to say, he will have to solve proble~ns which are
not in the end concerned with speech (in this case they are 'cognitive).

As far as psychology is concerned, speech is identical to any other

activity. It has a definite aim and is impelled by a motive, oi"more often
by a system of motives. These motives may be internal; for instance,
they may grow out of some need (Would you pass me the bread, so that
I may satisfy my hunger); internal motives may be ofa social nature (I
say something to caIn' ,he pupil who is getting Into a state at the black-
board). But they can also be external, that is to say social, not only in
their provenance but also in the way they are carried through. For
example, the teacher who asks his pupil a question on the lesson is at the
same time shaping a motive or a series of motives for the pupil's
subsequent utterance. But the pupil may at the same time be guided by
self-assertive motives, by the desire to gain or maintain prestige in the
eyes of the teacher and of the class, etc., and these motives may further-
more turn out to be dominant. However, more often than not the
motives impelling one to speech cannot be correlated, exactly and
exclusively with the speech; they are ofa more general character, and
speech turns out to bejust one of the steps towards the satisfa,ction of the
motive, towards the attainment of the final goal of the activity. What is
more, speech may often be replaced by other, non-verbal means of
attaining that final goal (rathq- than ask for the 'bread to be' passed, I
can get up and fetch it for mys f). Thus in real life man's speech usually
has the status not of an independent (speech) activity, but ofa speech act
included in a non-verbal (or, to be more precise, not exclusively
verbal) activity.
This does not mean that speech cannot be 4n independent activity.
It is such when a man has a specific motive (or system of motives) which
can be satisfied by speech itself, when the aim of the speech is not to
obtain something but to construct the utterance as such (or a whole
text-a system of utterances) , When a pupil in a foreign language lesson
speaks in order to speak..(the motives which lie behind this act concern
the correctness and appropriateness of his speech, and the satisfaction of
these motives depends on the extent to which his utterance is correct and
appropriate), this is a cha'racteristic example of pure speech activity.
In this case the spee<;h act consists not of the ,utterance as a whole,
but of its punctual components. The student 'thinks' what words or
constructions to use, how to combine them in the utterance, which
intonational model will be in order, and so on.
The psychological aspects of foreign speech activity can further be
summed up under two headings, and this is something to be taken into
account in teaching. On the one hand, the pupil should learn how to
convert this activity into a speech act, how to apply it to non-verbal
tasks and make it a part of his non-verbal activities. In order to achieve
this, he must learn to form the new language automatically, without
any participation of the conscious mind, or at least with its minimum
participation; he must learn to think about what to say, rather than how
to say it. When we talk of teaching dialogue-structured speech-
to a foreign language class, it is precisely this objective that we have in
mind. On the other hand, the student must learn to establish, with the
help of the new language, an independent communication activity, that is
to sayan activity, the <lim of which is not the immediate satisfaction of
concrete practical obje.:tives, but the setting up of contact and mutual
understanding, the establishing of interaction with the other members
of his social group (collective), the impact on the knowledge, skills,
system of social values (convictions), or emotions of another individual
or group. The teacher's explanation, the pupil's answer (here we have
in mind not a language lesson but a more general situation), the lecture
or report, the commentator's speech on television-these are all forms
of communication activity. In the manner of its manifestation (re-
stricted exclusively to speech) communication activity is identical with
pure speech activity, but its guiding motive is totally differe.nt. :~}
a<2hieving,_with~the_help of the foreign language, such .commu~lcatlOn
activity, the student is not speaking for the sake ofspealqng, nor m order
to say what he has been asked to say; he speaks for a different ~ur~os~,
and his motive takes him beyond the limits of speech as such: his aim IS
now to structure speech in view of the needed effect. He says not only
what he has to say, but also as it needs to be said in order to influence or
to promote interaction.ilNaturally, in order to achieve this, he h~s to
free the actual speech process from the participation of the consclOUS-
ness but here his task is more complex than in the first case. When we
talk' of teaching monological discourse in a foreign language, we more
often than not have in mind the second case-communication activity
with the help ofa foreign language.
Let us return once more to the concepts described above. We speak of
speech activity in the strict sense of the word when the guiding motive is
the production of correct and appropriate speech (as in a language
lesson). We speak of speech acts (as part of non-verbal activity), :v~en the
motive for the speech is non-specific and is common to that actiVity as a
whole. Finally, we speak of communication activity when the motives for
the speech lie again outside the concrete speech acts but are specific and
can only be satisfied by means of speech:
Speech act as part of non-verbal activity
Speech act as part of communication activity
 Psychology and the Language Learning process
It should be added that speech is not the only form of communication.
Either in conjunction with speech or instead of it we can use a variety of
other means for the same purposes: mimicry, gesticulation, non-verbal
signalling systems, etc. In the ~est of this exposition I shall be concern-
ing myself only with speech, even though in practice non-verbal modes
of intercourse occur quite frequently in comm~nication (according to
some psychologists, nearly 40% of information is' transmitted in this
way). ' sequently to turn them into operations and .then transform them Into
r habits. Here, too, we must call on the conscious mind of the pupll for
All that has been said above makes it evident that in teaching a foreigl)
language we are setting the learners a series of psychological tasks.
Firstly, we initiate them to speech activity as such, i.e. we teach them to
construct speech utterances or organized chains of 'speech u tter~nces.
But this is only one, albeit vital, stage. Secondly, we teach the use of the
language for non-verbal purposes, i.e. in the psythological sense we
insert into the speech 'activity a different motivation and direct it to a
different aim, we include it in ,a structure of non-verbal activity. In
order to effect this. transformation, we somehow have to turn-sp~ch
activity into speech acts and render it automatic. It is self-(!V~dent that
for this the learner needs t? have fluent mastery of tne structures of the
verbal utterances (speech acts) or, to put it more accurately, th(: rules
governing the structure of the utterances must be obliterated from the
learner's conscious mind. 'They must no longer be discrete speech acts,
and discrete tasks resolved in the process of speaking" but only auto-
matic operations. Thirdly, and finally, we teach students to deploy
these transformed speech acts at a new and higher level within the
ambit of communication activity. In so doing, we set in front of the
learner the task of producing not only linguistically correct speech,
appropriate to the situation, but also of attaining the best possible
utterances.
In this context it is worth considering the sequence of work involved in
the acquisition of foreign speech. Clearly one cannot perform any
speech activity in a foreign language without having the linguistic
material for the construction of utterances, without some knowledge of
vocabulary, grammar, or phonetics. At this stage, however, one only
needs to know them to the extent to which they are really indispensable
for the speech activity. For this reason it is important 'r hen beginning
the teaching of a new language to set a sort of 'absolute minimum', to
lay the foundations of the language, without which the teaching of any
speech activity would be impossible. The consciousness of the learner
must necessarily be involved in this process. Once such a foundatIOn
has been laid we must then build a 'ground floor': worn out discrete
speech acts included in the new language speech activity, in order ~ub-
help. We must then proceed to the 'first floor': transform the foreign
speech activity into f,.. ign speech acts. For that purpose we must al ter
the character of the task set before the student, change the motives and
aims of his speech, and place him in a situation where he will be com-
pelled to use speech as a tool. Then it will be in order to add a. 'second
floor' by progressing to a more complex situation and placmg new
demands on the learner's speech. Naturally, this sequence is of a very
general character, and merely indicates which 'floors' would be un-
thinkable if the others have not been built. In practice, we always put
ti1e finishing touches to the lower floors while work on the upper floors
is already under way; the mastering of vocabulary and grammar, for
instance, continues in parallel to the formation of speech activity and
its conversion into speech acts.
Sometimes it is asked whether one should begin by teaching dialogue
or monological discourse. The answer given is more often than not
incorrect and this is true even of the present author's earlier works. I
The poi~t is that the very conc pts of dialogue and monol?gi.cal dis-
course have been poorly defined in psychological terms; It IS qUite
obvious that self-contained discourse should not be taught from the very
beginning, but it does not follow that one should necessarily start with
pure dialogue.
There is one more remark to be made concerning speech operations
included in fully formed (automatic) speech acts. These are formed in
the learner not only and not necessarily as the result of the conversion
of previously conscious acts; as in other forms of activity, such opera-
tions may emerge in part as the result of unconscious probing, adapta-
 tion, and correlation with some external standard. There runs, parallel
~to the analytical path towards the acquisition of a foreign language, the
path of imitation; but the method of 'pure' imitation without the
participation of conscious analysis is less fruitful. We shall return to this
problem in the chapter devoted to the psychology of learning control.
2. The structure of speecl~ acts
On the psychological level, the astering of a foreign language entails
therefore above all the constitution of individual operations (arising
initially as independent acts) then their combination into an integral
utterance (speech act) and, finally, the modification of speech acts
according to the situation and the purpose of the communication.
Obviously to organize such language acquisition in the best possible
way, one has to have a clea~ idea of the operational structure of speech
acts. The study of this structure is, among other problems, the object of
a special branch of science-ps)'cholinguistics. At the present moment it'
is being rapidly developed in many countries, including the USSR.
, .
Man does not immedia'tely begin with speech, wt"th the choice and
combination of sounds', words,a:nd constructs. As in every purposive
activity, there has to be a plan (61' int,ention, or programme) for any
future utterance. Such a programme is generally of a visu'~i ~aturb;
the content of the utterance emerges as it were in the mind's eye of the
speaker in the form of a picture, schema, etc. This programme is
retained in the conscious mind (operative memory) until it is no longer
necessary, i.e. until we have said what we wanted and passed on to the
next utterance. The speech process consists in the translation of the
programme into a strict linguistic form, which in the mother tongue is a
more or less automatic procedure (we are not considering the written
language, to be distinguished from oral language above all by the
deliberate and conscious character of the choice and combination of
its components). In the early stages of mastering a foreign language, the
transition from the programme to the actual utterance is not achieved
directly as 'programme ---+ utterance', but is effected through the
mediation of the mother tong~le, viz 'pr~gramme ---+ utterance in th;l
mother tongue ---+ utterance m the foreign language'. 'J
Secondly, the transition itself is not automatic, and the learner will not
immediately or without effort come up with the foreign equivalent
to the utterance in the mOlher tongue, remember the rules, and succes-
sively apply them.
As teachers, our task is to 'get rid' of the intermediate stage as quickly
as possible and to bring the psychological structure of the utterance in
the foreign tongue as close as possible to that which operates in the
mother tongue. This means providing the student expediently with a
system of operations which will not only correspond to the real psy-
chological structure of the speech act, and will be easy to convert and
put into effect, but will also ensure maximum support from the habits
for the construction of utterances in the mother tongue. In this way we
can make the student's subsequent work much easier. The learner should
not so much be acquainted with the rules of translation from the mother
tongue to the foreign one (as is almost always done in current methodo-
logies) as, more importantly, with the rules ..governing the transition
from the speech operationo. of the mother tongue to those of the foreign
one.
'In this context it is relevant to say a few words about the operations
themsdves. There are two types of such operations, which we may
agree t~ describe as macro-operations and micro-operations.
Micro-operations are universal; they occur in the speech of all lan-
guages, and, in fact, do not relate only to speech. An example of this
kind of operation is the 'probability prognosis'; we have some informa-
tion, the beginning of a phrase, say, and we unconsciously and auto-
matically prognosticate its most probable ending:
'ShallI compare thee ... to a summer's day.'
'Would you pass the salt and ... pepper.'
Macro-operations are more complex and include the micro-operations.
They are specific to the speech of a particular language. For instance,
someone who can speak both Russian and English is evidently carrying
out so-called 'transformations' in his speech proces cs. But someone who
speaks Vietnamese is not carrying out the same sort ofmacro-operation,
for in his case the operational structure of the utterance is different.
There are three different types of transition from operations in the
mother tongue to those used in the foreign 'tongue. The first type is
simple transference of the operation to new linguistic material. The
second is the sort of transference which requires corrections and clarifi-
cation (both Russian and Gerr/,fin are inflected languages, but one
cannot simply put a German rk~iv where the Russian has a dative).
The third type is where the operation has to be formed from scratch (if
we teach Russian to a Vietnamese he will have to form all the operations
connected with the grammatical aspects of the utterance).
In the present chapter I shall not go into any more detail about the
taxonomy of particular speech operations and their sequence in the
speech process; the reader who so desires can find the relevant informa-
tion in the recommended reading. For our immediate purposes it is
important to stress that the concrete grammatical forms and indices
figure only at some late stage in the formation of the utterance: in the
first stages of this sort of construction we deal only with the most general
characteristics of content and grammar. This is true of the actual words
as well, which only acquire a semantic and phonetic 'fleshing out' at
the very end.
3. Language teaching methods and the
psychology of speech
So far we have been reasoning as though we had to construct a metho-
dology of foreign language teaching completely from scratch. But in
fact the task which lies before us is not that of creating a methodology
but of perfecting the current one, however far-reaching a procedure
that may need to be. So, in the light of what has been said, let us try
to examine some of the notions of foreign language teaching which are
common in current practice. . Nowadays methodology in schools and in institutes of higher education
Let us start with the so-called 'direct' methods. These share a complete
disregard for the psychological structure of the learner's mother tongue
and overlook the fact that in the acquisition of a foreign language the
learner necessarily turns for support to that psychological structure.
The proponents of direct methods are attempting to build speech
directly from the 'first floor', avoiding not only the 'ground floor', but
even to some extent the foundations. They do, on the other hand,
devote ~, areat deal of attention to the 'first' and 'second' floors. An
improv. ,nodification of this school are Lozanov's 'suggestopaedic'
method and the procedures of rapid foreign language teaching which
are similar to it. Lozanov's method differs from purely direct methods
in that utterances in the foreign tongue are introduced with the help of
utterances in the mother tongue. But they are correlated only according
to meaning, and their operational structure is not taken into account
(or, at least, not analysed for the student's benefit). On the other hand,
the value of Lozanov's method compared with others lies in the atten-
tion paid to the 'absolute minimum'. But it is not at all surprising that
those students who have studied according to the Lozanov method
make, as a rule, recurrent phonetic mistakes as well as serious gram-
matical errors. And in the teaching languages of the structural nature
of German and Russian, Lozanov's method in its 'classic' form has not
been very effective.
In our schools, the 'grammar-translation' method held sway for many
years. It will be clear from what I have said that this is a method with
which one can successfully construct only 'one-storey' speech. I t does
not really make any further demands on the student. The method was
anti-psychological in its very principles, and has now quite righ tly
passed into the realm ofh,tory.
Recent decades have seen the spread in schools of teaching through
'modelling methods'. This was a natural reaction against the 'gram-
mar-translation' method and placed special emphasis on the 'first floor',
i.e. on automatic and communicative speech, come what may.
is moving distinctly towards an organic merging of, on th'e one hand, a
system which takes into account the real operational structure of speech
utterances in a foreign language while basing itself on the structure of
 Chapter 4
utterances in the mother tongue and, on the other hand, a system
which endeavours to find the best means of rendering foreign speech
. '. I
Speech perception and the
actIvIty automatIc and transforming it into a truly valid communica-
tion activity. This is, however, impossible without some knowledge, psychology of perception
firstly, of psycho-linguistics, and, secondly, of the psychology of
communication; and it is pe~fectly understandable why these two
scientific disciplines should be gaining greater and gl'eater relevance
as a theoretical basis for foreign <;1I1guageteaching.
I

1. Perceptive acts
Perception is the process whereby the external tokens of objects and phenomena are
reflected zn man's consciousness. This process takes place with the help of man's
sensory organs, and is completed by the creation of an image of the perceived
object (II' I ~ubsequent operations with this image.

Perception can be distinguished from sensation by the fact that sensa-

tion is the reflection in the mind of certain isolated stimuli or irritan ts
(or of discrete properties of irritants) unrelated w the actual object. We
sense light or colour; but in real life it is always the light or colour of
something and sensation is merely a small step towards a fuller and more
accur\l.te object-bound perception of reality.

Perception differs from thought by the fact that, in the thought process,
basing ourselves on the tokens of the objects and phenomena we have
perceived, we, as it were, 'step back' from the reality of perception to
combine and analyse these tokens and come out with something which
we cannot perceive directly. When we see gathering storm clouds, we
can deduce as the result of the simplest thought/act that rain is about to
start falling. But we can perceive only the actual clouds. We shall see
later on, however, that thought is involved in the actual process of
perception.

Perception is not a passive 'absorption' of information, it is not per-

ception in the literal sense of the word. Man is not a screen on to which
random images are pl. cted; in order to perceive anything, he must
perform a specific activity, he must take active steps in order to perceive
reality.