The whole paper is really bad. I wish I had chosen a language teaching or researching degree instead of a much more difficult one. I would get paid for low quality flawed "research" for the rest of my life
In the whole article, there is no information at all about the success of the courses. Not even one mention of the results the people actually completing the course reach. And what the article is supposedly about, the success at completing the book, is not that sure either.
A rough measure of gauging the success of a self-study course is to look at perseverance in study. Do the students manage to reach the intermediate and advanced levels of the course? One of the earliest studies of persistence in foreign language study was conducted by Dupuy and Krashen (1998). The researchers collected background data and observed the classroom behaviour of a group of intermediate and advanced level college students. Their main interest was to document the characteristics of those who had “survived” the lower-level courses, and had advanced to the upper-division classes. They concluded that only a very small percentage of lower-division students did in fact reach what they refer to as the “Promised Land” of upper-division courses. Those who did advance in their studies had extensive exposure to the language outside of the classroom: 84.5 per cent had participated in a study abroad program.
How are they measuring the success of courses like TY or Living Language for the intermediate and advanced learners, if the books simply do not lead that far? They are basically testing how well does a turtle fly! Such courses (at least by the anglophone publishers) end at A2, at most B1. Or do they also mean monolingual courses that we continue with, having started with a bilingual one? The term "commercial language course" is weird. Aren't all of them commercial, except for those made by universities for their students only?
As we know very clearly from this forum, the successful students are usually those, who get through the basic level of such courses, and sometimes not even the whole book, and switch to monolingual resources. The monolingual courses work for self-study too and actually lead to the higher levels. Or people go right from those initial coursebooks to other kinds or resources than courses completely. In the eyes of these "researchers", a person wasting money on "advanced" Living Language course is more successful than a person, who has gotten some real basics from the first book and then bought a monolingual series by a better publisher, residing in the target langauge's country, or switched to tools like readlang and podcasts.
So, perhaps a better method would be to actually look at what the books are actually trying to do, such as get someone to A2, and test whether it is true.Of course the successful students, self studying or in college, get to the higher levels only with extensive exposure outside the classroom or their main coursebook. If they want to judge the self-study books by the results people get with one book alone, any book is gonna look bad.
And as they just took random people without any interest and motivation, of course 51% didn't bother to even start
. This is the main problem of such studies and why I don't consider their authors to be real scientists at all (humanities are in general inferior to real sciences, but some of the papers related to langauge learning really wouldn't be good even for a highschooler). The methodology is flawed and sample picked to give the desired results. This is just another example of such a bad paper.
Imagine such a trashy paper in medicine. The closest equivalent would be: the researchers gathered a thousand patients with various illnesses, such as hypertension, amputated legs, or myopia. All the subjects said they would like to be healthy. But only 1% persevered and kept going to the same doctor for ten years!
And the funny wear and tear test:
He examined a set of 10 self-study language books, representing six different languages. He recorded the highest page number in the book that showed some evidence of one or more measures in the Wear and Tear Index. To ensure that there had been a sufficient amount of patron use of the books, only those books that had been in circulation for at least one year were examined
Yes, a lot of people just give up in the middle (or more likely after 2 or 3 units). But others find out "hey, I like this and would like to keep the book, not worry about late returns, and possibly write in it" and they buy their own. Or "hey, I like learning German, but this book sucks, I'll buy another one".
Although Nielson’s (2011) intention was to measure the effectiveness of the programs in promoting language acquisition, she found that “the most striking finding [for both groups]...was severe attrition in participation” (p. 116).
Yeah, because RS and Tell Me More are trash and people don't want to keep doing something pointless. I dropped out of RS after ten minutes
What a failure I am
The attritionratefrombeginning to end was 99.4 per cent for Rosetta Stone, and 97.8 per cent for Tell Me More
At best, independent students appear to do no better, and usually worse than those enrolled in traditional language courses in high school and college.
Yes, they are worse at buying the upper level book in the same series. The highschooler simply has to go from year 2 to year 3, whether or not they want to, whether or not they've learnt something. But this statement is simply stupid, unless they can compare the % of people actually learning the langauge to a certain level through the high school classes and the % of people getting to that level with a self study course. That would be a meaningful idea.
Many adults who begin their self-study language courses probably do so with the goal of being fluent, or at least conversant, in the language. The data reviewed here indicates that this rarely happens. One possible cause of low completion rates may be poor teaching methods. Krashen (2013) noted that the language instruction provided by the most popular self-study course, Rosetta Stone, was “not very interesting, and a long way from compelling”
Yes. The quality is one issue, I totally agree. But the expectations of the researchers are more of a problem in this paper, not those of the learners. Truth be told, the authors of this paper have probably never learnt a language. If they had, they would try to measure how are the courses succeeding at what they are actually trying to do. It wouldn't be that hard. Gathering a relevant sample of people, measuring how many complete the course in question and ask why the others haven't, and then testing those, who have completed it.
