(9) Encourage gestures, even in the case of English students. In the earlier stages they should shake their heads when uttering a negative sentence, raise their eyebrows when using an interrogative form, and use other appropriate gestures for such words as _here_, _there_, _me_, _that_, _these_, etc.
In short, observe the principle of concreteness by using examples, many examples, cumulative examples, real examples, and examples embodying the personal interest.
We have laid great stress on the necessity for drill-like work, for mechanical work, for exercises calculated to secure automatism, for habit-forming types of work. It has even seemed at times that we take a malicious pleasure in pillorying and condemning precisely those forms of work which are generally the most attractive to the average student. "The writer of this book," some may say, "takes a savage delight in reproving teacher and student whenever they contemplate work of an interesting nature, heads them off whenever they approach anything resembling intellectual work, and turns them into channels of routine and repetition. He positively gloats over words like 'automaticity,' 'passivity,' 'mechanism,' or 'unconscious assimilation,' and apparently glories in the theory that language-learning like life itself should be 'one demd horrid grind.'"
We readily plead guilty to a firm insistence on habit-forming exercises and drills, but continue to urge in mitigation that the practical study of language, the mastery of any form of actual speech, is a habit-forming process and little else. We must have the courage and honesty to face facts as we find them: a language cannot be mastered by learning interesting things about that language, but only by assimilating the material of which that language is made up.
But our attitude, far from being a pessimistic one, is positively optimistic. We are prepared to deny most emphatically that good drill-work _is_ dull and uninteresting, and if some teachers make it so it is our duty to tell them not to. Those who have seen the sort of lessons that embody the forms of teaching which result from the rigid observance of these principles all testify that they are 'live' lessons (to use the term they most generally employ), that the students are keen and the teachers enthusiastic.