Audio lingual language programs

[Speakeasy]

... two-volume course for Brazilian Portuguese entitled "Português Contemporâneo", by Maria I. Abreu and Cléa Rameh, published by Georgetown University Press.

Mais, quelle coincidence! As it happens, I purchased a copy of these course books, including the two sets of audio cassettes, about three weeks ago. The course follows the audio-lingual method and the materials are of a very high quality. In my inquiry to the publisher, I asked if audio recordings might be available in other media such as CDs or MP3 downloadable files and their Customer Service Center replied that only audio cassettes are available and that they have no plans to digitize the recordings. Nonetheless, I believe that these materials are worth the price. By the way, there are many offers of new/used sets of these materials at somewhat lower prices on Amazon, AbeBooks, Alibris, etcetera.

In my search of the HTLAL, I came across only two specific references to these materials, both by the same forum member. He was of the opinion that the "Português Contemporâneo" course was somewhat better than the "FSI Portuguese Programmatic" course, most particularly because the former includes variations of sentence-pattern drills. While I am truly enjoying the former, I would say that a student could do just as well the latter as it contains innumerable practice sets that, while not exactly sentence-pattern drills, have a similar effect on learning. In both cases, the explanations of grammar are insufficient and I would recommend accompanying these courses with the simple, but very effective "Portuguese Verbs & Essentials of Grammar" by Sue Tyson-Wand, published by McGraw-Hill.

[Speakeasy]

Yesterday, I opened a separate discussion thread concerning the “Hebrew: the Audio-Lingual Way: Level One” course by Samuel Grand and Moshe Genser, published by Ktav in 1963. I had thought of adding it to this discussion thread but, ultimately, as I wished to draw everyone's attention to the current short-term availability on Ebay of the six vinyl records that were produced to accompany the text, I opted for the separate discussion thread. I will simply reiterate that, given the extreme rarity of these recorded materials, I would encourage any forum member who is interested in studying Hebrew to acquire the vinyl records, to convert them to mp3 files, and to act as an informal archivist who would be open to questions concerning them. Although I am not a student of Hebrew, I am willing to lend my active support. Note carefully that the offer on EBay expires in 4 days!

LINK: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BOXED-SET-6-R ... 1779027616

[Daristani]

It's too bad that Georgetown has no plans to update the audio for their Brazilian Portuguese books. They published some very good one-volume textbooks for Arabic dialects (Iraqi, Eastern, and Moroccan) back in the 1960s, which had accompanying audio cassettes that were probably out of the price-range of most individuals at that time. But they kept the books in print over the decades, and a few years ago, began to offer them with the audio on CDs, for very reasonable prices, thus keeping the books in print and useful for learners.

It would seem that this would be easy enough to do with the Portuguese materials as well, or to make the audio freely available on-line, the way the University of Michigan has done. (I can't imagine that they're selling very many sets of the cassettes these days...)

In any event, thanks much for asking, and for posting the results of your query; I used the books in a first-year college Portuguese class decades ago, and I think they were a pretty good introduction to the language.

[Speakeasy]

Following my discovery of document ED039791 entitled "Audio-Lingual Drills for Foreign Language Teaching" on the ERIC website, I managed to locate a few printed copies of the audio-lingual exercise sets for German and Italian named therein. However, not surprisingly, most of the publishers are no longer in business, those who continue to exist have not responded to my requests for information on the audio recordings and, in sum, I have not been able to locate the latter.

Nonetheless, in the course of my searches, I happened upon a truly stellar example of the audio-lingual method: A-LM (Audio-Lingual Method) a four level programme prepared by the staff of the Modern Language Materials Development Center, pursuant to a contract with the United States Office of Education, published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. for the teaching of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian in American secondary schools in the 1960’s. The course materials consisted of separate Student and Instructors’ manuals totalling some 2,000 pages of very dense text. The course books were supported by reel-to-reel tape recordings or vinyl record sets, for use in a Language Laboratory, for which my estimate is 35 hours of dialogues, drills, and narratives.

Since this discovery, I have been feverishly ordering copies of materials from online vendors (the task of locating copies is complicated by the fact that many vendors have used their own nomenclature for identifying the books and record sets). The Student Texts are presented almost entirely in the target language and include only a few sparse notes on grammar in English. Based on the cumulative glossary in my copy of A-LM German Level Four, it appears that these courses introduced students to a staggering vocabulary of some 10,000 words! In my opinion, these texts rival those of the FSI Basic Courses in terms of the richness of the dialogues and narratives, the quality of production, and the overall coverage of the target language. The HTLAL contains only a couple of references to the A-LM courses, comprised chiefly of expressions of fondness for having studied with these materials in the 1960’s. Similar infrequent comments can be found on the internet.

[Tomás]

Following my discovery of document ED039791 entitled "Audio-Lingual Drills for Foreign Language Teaching" on the ERIC website, I managed to locate a few printed copies of the audio-lingual exercise sets for German and Italian named therein. However, not surprisingly, most of the publishers are no longer in business, those who continue to exist have not responded to my requests for information on the audio recordings and, in sum, I have not been able to locate the latter.

Nonetheless, in the course of my searches, I happened upon a truly stellar example of the audio-lingual method: A-LM (Audio-Lingual Method) a four level programme prepared by the staff of the Modern Language Materials Development Center, pursuant to a contract with the United States Office of Education, published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. for the teaching of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian in American secondary schools in the 1960’s. The course materials consisted of separate Student and Instructors’ manuals totalling some 2,000 pages of very dense text. The course books were supported by reel-to-reel tape recordings or vinyl record sets, for use in a Language Laboratory, for which my estimate is 35 hours of dialogues, drills, and narratives.

Since this discovery, I have been feverishly ordering copies of materials from online vendors (the task of locating copies is complicated by the fact that many vendors have used their own nomenclature for identifying the books and record sets). The Student Texts are presented almost entirely in the target language and include only a few sparse notes on grammar in English. Based on the cumulative glossary in my copy of A-LM German Level Four, it appears that these courses introduced students to a staggering vocabulary of some 10,000 words! In my opinion, these texts rival those of the FSI Basic Courses in terms of the richness of the dialogues and narratives, the quality of production, and the overall coverage of the target language. The HTLAL contains only a couple of references to the A-LM courses, comprised chiefly of expressions of fondness for having studied with these materials in the 1960’s. Similar infrequent comments can be found on the internet.

I tried to find the Spanish materials in that ERIC link you gave, but they are not even in Worldcat. Would love to hear more about the Harcourt Brace courses once you receive them.

[Tomás]

Following my discovery of document ED039791 entitled "Audio-Lingual Drills for Foreign Language Teaching" on the ERIC website, I managed to locate a few printed copies of the audio-lingual exercise sets for German and Italian named therein. However, not surprisingly, most of the publishers are no longer in business, those who continue to exist have not responded to my requests for information on the audio recordings and, in sum, I have not been able to locate the latter.

Nonetheless, in the course of my searches, I happened upon a truly stellar example of the audio-lingual method: A-LM (Audio-Lingual Method) a four level programme prepared by the staff of the Modern Language Materials Development Center, pursuant to a contract with the United States Office of Education, published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. for the teaching of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian in American secondary schools in the 1960’s. The course materials consisted of separate Student and Instructors’ manuals totalling some 2,000 pages of very dense text. The course books were supported by reel-to-reel tape recordings or vinyl record sets, for use in a Language Laboratory, for which my estimate is 35 hours of dialogues, drills, and narratives.

Since this discovery, I have been feverishly ordering copies of materials from online vendors (the task of locating copies is complicated by the fact that many vendors have used their own nomenclature for identifying the books and record sets). The Student Texts are presented almost entirely in the target language and include only a few sparse notes on grammar in English. Based on the cumulative glossary in my copy of A-LM German Level Four, it appears that these courses introduced students to a staggering vocabulary of some 10,000 words! In my opinion, these texts rival those of the FSI Basic Courses in terms of the richness of the dialogues and narratives, the quality of production, and the overall coverage of the target language. The HTLAL contains only a couple of references to the A-LM courses, comprised chiefly of expressions of fondness for having studied with these materials in the 1960’s. Similar infrequent comments can be found on the internet.

I tried to find the Spanish materials in that ERIC link you gave, but they are not even in Worldcat. Correction, they're there, but no libraries own them. Would love to hear more about the Harcourt Brace Spanish course if you get a look at it.

[Speakeasy]

... Would love to hear more about the Harcourt Brace Spanish course if you get a look at it.

I have placed orders for virtually all of the A-LM materials that are presently available for French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish and, following their receipt, I will post a more complete description and review. The only item that I decided not to order was the Spanish Level Four student textbook http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/015388780X/ref=dp_olp_used_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=used

[PeterMollenburg]

For Dutch and Persian there is the old Spoken Language Services books and tapes:

http://pro.spidergraphics.com/spo/spo_S ... B8560D83C6

I have never used it and only know it from Alexander Arguelles review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TNQFrY ... 9E1CA2C2C0

Hi Elexi,

Thank you for pointing this out. I had never heard of this series. Have you (or anyone else reading this) had any experience in using any of these Spoken Language Services courses? I watched Alexander Arguelles' review and from what I can gather, these courses look quite useful. They seem to be like a hybrid of FSI and Assimil in a way.

Edited to add:

One DLI resource you might not know is GLOSS. It's available for plenty of languages and incredibly useful after A2-B1. All lessons come with audio, transcripts and translations (click source at the top).

How have you found GLOSS Serpent? Effective for intermediate learning?

Hello Ownerzeff,
Thank you for your reply as well as the links to the materials. I am nonplussed by my lack of success in locating these files through my own searchs; merci beaucoup!

Fellow Forum Member "daristani" has sent me an Email commenting on the subject of "Speak Dutch" textbook and audio files. As a follow-up to our exchanges (yours, mine, his), I will open a new discussion thread on "Speak Dutch" as I will be asking the Director of the Indiana CeLT to release the audio recordings to the public and I would like the discussion recorded separately. Thanks again for your comments and, once again, my public thanks to daristani for his support.

Awesome! I hope they happily oblige.

Oh, and I really like the sound of those A-LM courses! I am certainly beginning to realise how much more thorough language courses from many decades ago were. It's a shame we can't have the best of both worlds now- very extensive drilling via through materials coupled with the use if modern technology and multimedia (A-FM coupled with Destinos/FIA and Assimil- now that would be a massive course!)

[Speakeasy]

... the subject of "Speak Dutch" ... audio files ... I will be asking the Director of the Indiana CeLT to release the audio recordings to the public ...

Awesome! I hope they happily oblige.

The Indiana University CeLt replied that they had only an index card on file with annotation to the effect that the audio recordings had been provided to them and that the annotation made no specific mention of permission to release of the audio recordings to the public. Accordingly, erring on the side of caution, they decided to maintain the access to these materials as being restricted to registered students, staff, and faculty. Subsequently, over a period of six months, I sent several carefully-worded Emails to the presumed holder of the copyright to these materials, Calvin College, requesting that they grant Indiana University the permission to release the audio files to the public ... they never replied.

[PeterMollenburg]

... the subject of "Speak Dutch" ... audio files ... I will be asking the Director of the Indiana CeLT to release the audio recordings to the public ...

Awesome! I hope they happily oblige.

The Indiana University CeLt replied that they had only an index card on file with annotation to the effect that the audio recordings had been provided to them and that the annotation made no specific mention of permission to release of the audio recordings to the public. Accordingly, erring on the side of caution, they decided to maintain the access to these materials as being restricted to registered students, staff, and faculty. Subsequently, over a period of six months, I sent several carefully-worded Emails to the presumed holder of the copyright to these materials, Calvin College, requesting that they grant Indiana University the permission to release the audio files to the public ... they never replied.

That's a shame. I certainly appreciate your efforts nonetheless. Thanks for replying Speakeasy