Stefan wrote:The point I was trying to make is that you spend a lot of hours (I believe MT is about 21 hours) listening and afterwards I wasn't sure what I really knew. I felt like I lacked the fundamental grammar tables that you can get from any textbook at a glance. It's been a few years since I went through the course so it's possible that my memory is clouded by the frustration I felt at the time.
That's the interesting thing -- it teaches you a lot, but doesn't do it in as conscious a way as most courses. There's something reassuring about explicit grammar tables, because it's a thing you can point at and say "I know that," but there's a big difference between being able to describe a language point and being able to use it. Thomas goes straight for the latter, and if you're used to being able to list "what I know" then you're going to be uncomfortable with it.
PeterMollenburg wrote:I don't see an issue with overlap with courses as I believe we get a massive amount of repetition in native content (TV for example) in conversations and so on.
I think you're comparing apples and oranges here. Repetition of content is not the same as repetition of presentation of content.
Repetition is good and necessary. When using courses you're not necessarily going to retain something you come across the first time.
True, but there's a problem: when you look at something you've seen before, you're likely to think "I know this" and stop paying attention. The only way to stop the "I know this" feeling is to be shown you're wrong, and only then have it re-explained. For the self-teacher, that means doing exercises with corrections available and then looking back at the rules when you make mistakes.
Still if one did 10 hours a day then progress would be quick enough I'd think, but I could be wrong.
There are very few people on the planet who could handle 10 hours a day without burning out. You would need to be following the world's best planned, most engaging course to succeed.
Cavesa wrote:Tutor can be very useful for speaking and writing practice and feedback, yes, that is extremely true and paying one for these purposes is a good idea.
But not so much for explaining the tasks (which is a more important role in some more advanced exams with tons of formal stuff to take into account. B1 writing genres and speaking situations are explained and given examples of everywhere) or the exam in general, which many tutors love to waste hours on. Not for tasks including multiple choice answers and such, a key to exercises suffices here, another favourite.
Well that all depends on the tutor. A good tutor is invaluable for exam technique. When I'm prepping students for Cambridge English exams, I spend a lot of time on getting them to talk through the process of completing the task -- what is the goal? what are you being tested on? what clues in the question help you find the answer? I've seen very few prep materials that go into that sort of depth, and it is something that is very hard to put down on paper because there needs to be space to react to what the student says. (The best prep material I've seen was actually for the City & Guilds English exam.)
From my experience, being repeatedly corrected a mistake is worthless without the student taking a grammar book and studying on their own.
The problem here is too much explicit correction and re-explanation. Students should be correcting their own errors wherever possible -- the tutor should be giving just enough feedback to allow this to happen, and that should require less and less information each time. Ideally a good tutor should get to the point where raising one eyebrow is enough to get students to correct themselves.
And I totally don't think any tutor would say "What learning materials does the person have? Assimil, Michel Thomas, French in Action, the book 501 Spanish verbs? Good stuff but let's add some websites and other tools.". Instead it would be "What is Assimil? What is Michel Thomas? Oh, and you don't need an explicit verbbook. Let's go through my favourite classroom series instead and I'll give you personally copies from other books to supplement it." Which usually leads to using crappy courses, worse organisation of the learning process, and more dependence on the teacher, without necessarily leading to better results.
If you go to a tutor for exam prep and they propose a course book, then they're not doing exam prep -- they're more interested in teaching the language, and you should find another teacher who's willing to just focus on exam technique.
There really is nothing wrong with a teacher who follows an exam prep book, as long as they are genuinely adding something -- clarifying doubts and helping you automise the process.
I may be a bit controversial here, but I don't think FSI (except for the pronunciation drills) is a good course now. Not cefr labeled, very intensive yet with curriculum not necessarily teaching the B1 exam stuff.
Also mind-numbingly repetitive and mechanical, and pretty roundly rejected by experts as ineffective in learning to use a language. I really don't get why so many people here are so keen on it.