Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
In language, broadly speaking, the unconscious has had a great
effect on the child. We should also learn from the fact that primitive
peoples have often developed a much richer grammar than those
present in the languages of more civilized peoples. This is seldom
taken into account outside of spiritual science, but it is something
we should consider as a result of a genuine observation of human
beings, namely, that the human being develops a logic from within
so that language is actually logically formed. Thus we do not need to
teach grammar in a way other than by bringing what already exists
as a completely developed language structure into consciousness.
When teaching and learning grammar, we need only to follow the
general tendency of awakening the child and of bringing that into
consciousness. We need only to develop those forces that can be
developed until the age of nine, in the sense that I described before.
We need to use the instruction in language in order to continue to
awaken the child. We can best do that if we use every opportunity
that occurs to work from dialect. If we have a child who before the
age of seven has already learned a more educated informal language,
the so-called standard language, it will be extremely difficult to reach
the aspect of the child’s unconscious that has a natural relationship
to the logical formation of language, since that has already withered.
Thus if we have children who speak dialect and others who do not in
the same class, we should always connect our instruction in grammar
with what those children who do speak in dialect already provide us.
We first want to try to find the structure of a sentence and then
a word from the perspective of dialect. We can do that if we proceed
by having a child say a sentence, for example, one that is as simple
as possible. The main thing the sentence will always contain is
something that is an inner enlivening of an activity. The more often
we begin with an inner enlivening of an activity, the more we will
be able to achieve an awakening of consciousness in the child while
teaching language.
There is a very extensive and clever literature about so-called
subjectless sentences, for instance, “It is raining,” “It is lightning,” “It
is thundering,” and so forth. The most important point about this
is hardly mentioned in all of that research, however. What is most