How do YOU use dialogues in language courses?

[Elexi]

Dialogues are pretty much a staple of every language course - Eleanor Dickey's study of Greek and near middle eastern language learning material at the turn of the common era shows they were just as popular then as they are now.

But how do you (you, yourself that is) use them?

Personally, I first learn the words in the dialogue if a word list is provided in Memrise. If I have the audio, I listen and try to the repeat the dialogue before reading it. I then use Scanbot on my Iphone to scan a pdf copy onto my tablet - this allows me to look up words I don't remember and cut and paste phrases and sayings that I could use in conversation. If the lesson has a grammatical component (as they normally do) I isolate the grammar features in the dialogue for my notes. With something like Linguaphone, a BBC course or Assimil I listen to and repeat the dialogue a few times - Never really got into shadowing.

Occasionally I go back randomly to an old dialogue and see if I can still follow it. Linguaphone is good for this as the dialogues are quite long.

What do you do to extract the goodness out of dialogues?

[Iversen]

While you wait for testimony from dedicated users of textbook dialogues, I'll just mention that I don't use dialogues. My aim is first and foremost to learn to read and write the language, and the words and expressions I need are not necessarily the same as you use in dialogues. Besides I have become somewhat allergic to fiction and fiction in text books isn't exempt from that. At an early stage I may have to use the texts in textbooks - whatever their 'genre' - because they are the easiest ones, but as soon as I can read a popular science article (with the help of a translation and/or wordbook) I drop the textbooks.

[MorkTheFiddle]

My foray into memorizing dialogues was using Living Language (I think) materials for French and for Spanish. As a false beginner, the meanings of the vocabulary posed no problems. Bowing my head, I worked through the dialogue line by line until I mastered it. After memorizing one dialogue, I moved on to the next. There were 20 dialogues in total for each language, but I never got past 10 for either language. This was before the days of Memrise, Anki, Quizlet, or even personal computers, but a few of the phrases still pop into my head from time to time. "Ha sido un viaje largo y cansado," is one. Another is "Soy Carlos Andrade, de Mexico." Such a dummy I was, I made no effort to try to do anything more with the dialogues. Would there had been a Rocket approach to badger me into using and modifying the dialogues. Overall, I would give my approach an F. Although successful in memorizing 20 dialogues, they did me very little good in real life situations, particularly in France

[luke]

What do you do to extract the goodness out of dialogues?

Listen, understand, read, shadow, write, repeat, review. Most of the repeating comes from listening, reading, shadowing. I generally only write a dialogue once. Reviews come up over the months / years. Years come in when a language is neglected for a long time. Reviewing previously learned material at that time is a quick way to reconstitute skills.

[migueljuan]

What do you do to extract the goodness out of dialogues?

This is a really good question! At the beginning of the year, I resolved for the 5th time or so to learn Spanish. I believe the term used to describe me is "false beginner." At any rate, years ago I purchased the Barron's Spanish course. Much later I learned that the course is actually FSI Spanish Basic Units 1-15. I have downloaded FSI and that is now the basis of my Spanish learning. The oft-heard criticism of FSI is that they are 'boring.' While I do not agree with this assessment, I have found the lessons to be too long in the sense that it is difficult to go through lessons repeatedly. Much of this length is attributed to the drills. The drills, while important, take away from the ability to master the dialogues and can be studied/learned via other means. So, to answer your question, here is what I do to extract the goodness out of dialogues:

1. For each FSI unit, which I am now just about finished with Unit 6, I first shorten the audio element of the unit by cutting the unit down to only the dialogue. This chops a 50-60 minute lesson down to 10-15 minutes. This makes it easy for me to listen to the dialogue several times throughout the week (at least ten) and, thus, work toward mastery. The dialogues are loaded onto my phone and grouped into playlists. Playlists consist of units 1-15, 16-30, etc. I can then listen to them wherever I am, but it is mostly in the car, or while I am walking my dogs. I listen to the dialogue for the unit I am in at least once per day.

2. I use the Windows snipping tool to capture the dialogue and grammar notes for each unit into a Google Doc. This enables me to easily find the unit I am working on and read it over again and again; sometimes with the dialogue on, and sometimes not.

3. I also use the snipping tool to capture the drills from each lesson focusing on the translation drills and other drills that have both the English and Spanish translations. I do not capture any narrations or other practice elements that are only in Spanish or are fill in the blanks. After I have listened to the dialogue a few times and have a handle on the vocabulary, etc., I will study the drills. I like to translate them from Spanish to English in writing and also like to speak the English to Spanish translation.

4. Finally, I use Anki for all of the content listed above. Every line of the dialogue part of the lesson and every line of drill is added to Anki for additional practice. As I said at the beginning of the post, I believe that there are other ways to practice the drills besides listening through the lesson. I believe that #3 and #4 really capture this.

So far the results have been good. I am just about finished with Unit 6 and have never made it this far before. I look forward to practicing the dialogues and by the time I finish them I can truly hear the words being spoken and understand them. Of course, some of this comprehension comes from memorization, but the more you listen to the dialogues the more they seem to slow down for you. It is really a cool feeling!

Studying in this manner does have a price. It takes time to take those snips and copy them into Google Docs and Anki cards. I think it is worth the effort because even the act of completing the snip, copy, and paste is time that I am studying the content and learning.

Looking forward to Unit 7 starting on Monday.

[migueljuan]

While you wait for testimony from dedicated users of textbook dialogues, I'll just mention that I don't use dialogues. My aim is first and foremost to learn to read and write the language, and the words and expressions I need are not necessarily the same as you use in dialogues. Besides I have become somewhat allergic to fiction and fiction in text books isn't exempt from that. At an early stage I may have to use the texts in textbooks - whatever their 'genre' - because they are the easiest ones, but as soon as I can read a popular science article (with the help of a translation and/or wordbook) I drop the textbooks.

This certainly sounds like an interesting approach. Do you find that your pronunciation and comprehension skills lag behind with this approach?

[blaurebell]

The only dialogues I use are Assimil dialogues. Generally I find dialogues tedious and devoid of real world application. For example, there is always a dialogue asking a stranger for directions. I would never do that, not even in my native language, especially in this day and age when I can just look at a map on my phone and have GPS for my location. And well, Assimil dialogues are also like that. The Russian Assimil dialogues I'm using right now seem obsessed with forests and the sea, nothing I speak about obsessively myself.

So, I only use dialogues as examples for shadowing and picking up grammar. I actually shadow first and only then read the text, unless there is something that I can't seem to hear properly. In that case I will look at only this particular line. Usually I will already figure out what it's all about by just shadowing it, even if a lot of the words are unknown. I usually have flashes of understanding where suddenly certain things become clear just from context. I like the magic of that, it's like watching my brain learn and it's good for practicing certain structures. The shadowing has also sorted out my accent. The other day my mum asked me to read something to her in Russian to see how I was progressing and she was very happy. On my last attempt with Russian I didn't do shadowing and she couldn't understand a word I was saying. This time she said that she could understand me perfectly and that I don't have a bad accent at all! So, definitely worth doing.