The use of FSI, a question of efficiency.

[blaurebell]

Yes, I agree that communicative and task-based approaches are weak, for precisely those reasons. But production doesn't actually have to mean interaction. I don't imagine you've ever used a Michel Thomas course (they're marketed to English speakers) but what he does is translation based on production.

Indeed, I haven't used Michel Thomas, although that's not because they're marketed to English speakers. I never use German base resources anyway now because my German is actually a little rusty - haven't spoken it more often than once a week for 10 years now. As for Michel Thomas, I have researched the method and found it very interesting, but was struggling to find a good time to integrate it. Before Assimil it would be a waste of time because I focus on comprehension first, not production, and after Assimil I tend to find it too easy, so it's difficult to get through it. Those bits you posted seem very good though. The only real problem I have with it is that obnoxious student making mistakes, I don't even want to get exposed to any of that, so that's super annoying Maybe I'll give it a try with Russian though, I'm not sure. With Russian I find the grammar such a grind that going over the basics again and again seems rather helpful actually.

[Cainntear]

The only real problem I have with it is that obnoxious student making mistakes, I don't even want to get exposed to any of that, so that's super annoying

Personally, I found that one of its strengths. The presence of other students meant I could picture being in a classroom, whereas most audio courses feel like a voice speaking to me out of a black void. Also, I'm kind of critical of my own performance, and the students' errors are a reminder that I'm not expected to get 100% of the answers correct.

Maybe I'll give it a try with Russian though, I'm not sure. With Russian I find the grammar such a grind that going over the basics again and again seems rather helpful actually.

The Russian course isn't proper MT - the guy himself was dead before they started making it. Many of the things I would identify as fundamental to what Thomas did are missing from the other MT Method courses. What he said about his own method on the TV documentary that was filmed before the courses came out didn't really give any insight into how his material was structured, and the official book on MT (by Jonathan Solity) doesn't identify any of the things that I believe are fundamentally important in MT's teaching. I had always kind of expected I'd do my dissertation on the subject of MT if I did a masters, and now here I am on a masters course and my dissertation has nothing to do with him at all.

[blaurebell]

The Russian course isn't proper MT - the guy himself was dead before they started making it.

Does that mean it's not worth doing in your opinion or is enough of the method preserved to get something out of it?

[Fortheo]

The Russian course isn't proper MT - the guy himself was dead before they started making it.

Does that mean it's not worth doing in your opinion or is enough of the method preserved to get something out of it?

That's pretty much all I'm doing right now for Russian, so let's hope I'm getting something out of it. Also, I've done several Michel Thomas courses and I've almost always found the courses without Michel Thomas to be the better courses. That's just a matter of opinion, though.

[blaurebell]

That's pretty much all I'm doing right now for Russian, so let's hope I'm getting something out of it. Also, I've done several Michel Thomas courses and I've almost always found the courses without Michel Thomas to be the better courses. That's just a matter of opinion, though.

Thanks for the insight, in that case I'll make an effort to integrate it somehow!

[reineke]

D is for Drills

"What happened to drilling? Doesn’t anyone drill any more? Few teachers will admit to it. There’s something slightly unsavoury about drilling – like hairspray. Or bicycle clips. Drilling belongs to another era.

An era in which I was trained. When I was taught to teach, drilling was the quintessential – the ur-activity – in classroom practice. Following the precepts of structuralist linguists and behaviourist psychologists, it was taken as axiomatic that “TO LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE ONE MUST ESTABLISH ORALLY THE PATTERNS OF THE LANGUAGE AS SUBCONSCIOUS HABITS” (Lado & Fries, 1943, 1979- emphasis in original!). In the words of one pedagogue, “It is these basic patterns that constitute the learner’s task. They require drill, drill, and more drill, and only enough vocabulary to make such drills possible” (Hockett, 1959, cited in Richards and Rodgers 1986).

Accordingly, on my initial training, teaching practice required that you demonstrate the ability to perform a wide variety of drills – imitation drills, chorus drills, substitution drills, variable substitution drills, transformation drills, conversion drills, etc etc – with consummate skill, even panache! Six months into my first teaching job, I was so slick at elicit-and-drill it felt at times that I was on auto-pilot.

At the same time I was beginning to intuit a serious flaw in the elicit-and-drill methodology that I’d been trained in. In terms of fixing structures in memory, drilling worked great in the very short term – the length of a lesson, max. But beyond the lesson, it seemed that any pattern induction that might have resulted from all that excruciating repetition had simply evaporated. The minds of the students seem to march to the beat of a different drum. Proof of which was the occasion when – in the middle of a present-perfect-for-past-experience-in-indefinite-time drill – a student stopped to ask me a real question about my past-experience-in-indefinite time, but using the past simple!

Of course, similar doubts were being expressed at a more elevated level too. By the end of the 70s the theoretical basis of audiolingualism had been well and truly discredited, and its hallmark drills – and the language laboratories that were their technological incarnation – had been consigned to the dust-heap of methodology. Where methodology texts, such as Wilga Rivers Teaching Foreign Language Skills (1968) had devoted whole chapters to structure drills, the new generation of manuals hardly mentioned them at all. Or if they did, they had a strong health warning attached. Thus, Harmer (1991) advises: “They should not be used for too long or too frequently” (p. 92). And Brown (1994) celebrates the fact that “Today, thankfully, we have developed teaching practices that make only minimal—or optimal—use of such drilling” (p. 138).

So, have drills really disappeared? And, if not, how can they be used “optimally”?"

https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/20 ... or-drills/

[Elexi]

Thanks for that link. Also it is one of the few blog articles where there comments actually are worth reading.

[Jaleel10]

I have a love/hate relationship with the FSI Spanish Basic course. I can see the benefit of the drills but I also find them tedious and the grammatical explanations are not comprehensive (as to be expected for material not designed as a stand alone course). Recently, the topic I was covering in Gramátical del Uso del Español B1-B2 and FSI Basic overlapped to a great extent and I found that this overlap greatly increased both my enjoyment of these units and the ease with which I internalized the material. If I were to start again or to do a second pass with FSI, I think I would synchronize my use of GdUdE with FSI. I would use FSI as a tool to get more out of the material covered in GdUdE.

This is such an awesome idea. I'll try to go through the FSI material and GdUdE and see if I can put together something like this. I have yet to start using FSI and this seems like a very efficient approach because GdUdE covers all the grammar as prescribed by the Cervantes Institute.

(Don't mind me, just digging through old posts to see how best to use FSI)

[cjareck]

I put all the FSI (Hebrew Basic Course) drills into Anki. It takes time to prepare the cards and to get through them later, but earlier I just listened to the lessons (about ten times each one) and not learned much that way. One may see from the progress bar in my signature, that there left some lessons to deal with.

[Speakeasy]

I have a love/hate relationship with the FSI Spanish Basic course. I can see the benefit of the drills but I also find them tedious and the grammatical explanations are not comprehensive ...

Jaleel10, thank you very much for reviving the above quote. Although I am fond of the audio-lingual method, particularly at the Introductory Level, I must admit that klvik's experiences are not uncommon.

Generally speaking, courses based on the audio-lingual method deliberately place very little emphasis on grammatical explanations and, as a substitute, introduce the structure of the language through thousands of sentence-pattern drills. The theory was that practising the drills would replace the explanations in a manner similar to full-immersion language-learning. Unfortunately, this point of view neglected at least two factors to which some students are particularly sensitive:

(a) some language learners are "grammar freaks" who truly appreciate knowing the rules of a game before stepping onto the playing field. Knowing the rules beforehand simultaneously raises their level of self-confidence and their awareness of how the game is to be played. This, in turn, has a positive impact on their performance, and

(b) crafting clever, engaging, stimulating, meaningful, memorable, sentence-pattern drills is about as easy as writing truly great literature. Not all language learners will be stimulated by a "Roman de gare", some require great prose.