Steve wrote:Cainntear wrote:When a bunch of books written by language teachers with years of experience, following established educational conventions, and reviewed by a team of educational professionals get a pile of bullsh*t added by the marketing department, you've still got an acceptable product. One amateur working alone is not going to achieve that.
As I say: marketing is marketing, but product is product.
Institutional inertia and everybody doing the same thing is not always a sign of being good. "Acceptable" is ambiguous and might be preventing the adoption of something much better.
Indeed not, but that doesn't mean somebody standing up and saying "I've discovered something" is an improvement.
Most of the "discoveries" these people claim to have made are quite simply standard practice in teaching, or former standard practices that have gone out of fashion. They are already well documented and described, but it's rare that you'll find any language influencer willing to engage seriously in a discussion of the literature.
And more than that -- language influencers tend to focus on one single feature of language or learning activity as being the "key" to language learning, even more so than the mainstream. Speaking of the mainstream... Rosetta Stone. That was invented by a guy who was neither a linguist nor a language teacher. He "discovered" something obvious: that immersion helps; he built a whole method around one type of activity that he called "simulated immersion" despite it not being immersion at all.
When it comes to internet polyglots and methods, I take particular issue with the Mimic Method and its talk of the concept of "flow". Flow here is just a synonym for the notion of "prosody" from linguistics. Unlike other internet polyglots, however, Idahosa Ness has studied linguistics formally, and I think it's fair to assume he's familiar with the term. I agree that "flow" is a far more learner-friendly term than "prosody", but the way he initially presented the concept was as though it was something new and unique to his method. He's toned down the marketing in recent years, but it still reads to me as though he's hiding information when he describes "flow" without reference to "prosody".