The use of FSI, a question of efficiency.

[jsega]

I'll chime in here:

My Spanish is pretty unbalanced. I watch film and listen to podcasts and lectures without missing anything. I read novels and nonfiction in my fields as well as areas of interest and I can measure unknown words per 100 pages and still be in the single digits. I can write, at least in text messages, pretty well, though not as well as that level of comprehension might lead one to expect.

And in the last three weeks, I've had two drop-of-the-hat conversations in Spanish where I'm lucky if I expressed myself at B2.

So I got irritated about this yesterday, and I've begun a process by which by the end of March I will have shadowed every dialogue and done every oral drill in the whole of the FSI Spanish program by the end of the month. I'm not learning anything new - I know all these words, and I know all this grammar, at least in theory. But it damn well better automate my production. I think (and hope!) that Blaurebell's #2 is correct. I'll find out.

This makes me curious for some more context. Do you speak on a daily basis (I'm assuming not based on your wording but I just want it to be clear)?

[reineke]

B1 = 1+
B2 = 2/2+
C1 = 3/3+

FSI students work closely with native speaking instructors. Most students are not high level diplomats and not everyone graduates with a 3 in speaking. Such learning is apparently more prone to forgetting than a slow and steady approach. Graduates may not do well in unplanned conversations.

Lessons learned...

"Lesson 10. Conversation, which on the surface appears to be one of the most basic forms of communication, is actually one of the hardest to master. A seasoned Foreign Service officer, who had learned several languages to a high level, was overheard to remark that engaging in conversation—particularly in multiparty settings—was the ultimate test of someone’s language ability.

...Of all the tasks graduates carry out at post in the foreign language ordinary conversation is the one area of language use in which they unanimously claim to experience the most difficulty, noting specifically problems in following the threads of conversations in multigroup settings. Interestingly, such reports appear to fly in the face of some of the assumptions of the language proficiency level descriptions of the Interagency Language Roundtable and ACTFL, which relegate “extensive but casual social conversation” to a relatively low-level speaking skill while raising professional language use and certain institutionalized forms of talk to a higher level. The properties of ordinary social conversation imply that language learners need to practice at least all of the following:

• following rapid and unpredictable turns in topic,
• displaying understanding and involvement,
• producing unplanned speech,
• coping with the speed of the turn-taking, and
• coping with background noise.

Participants in conversation must at once listen to what their interlocutor is saying, formulate their contribution, make their contribution relevant, and utter their contribution in a timely way, lest they lose the thread of the conversation. Unlike most other typical face-to-face interactions, no individual can successfully “control” a free-wheeling multi-party conversation. In a sense, conversation is more about listening than about speaking..."

Please do finish the course and share your observations.

[jsega]

...
Graduates may not do well in unplanned conversations.

Lessons learned...

"Lesson 10. Conversation, which on the surface appears to be one of the most basic forms of communication, is actually one of the hardest to master. A seasoned Foreign Service officer, who had learned several languages to a high level, was overheard to remark that engaging in conversation—particularly in multiparty settings—was the ultimate test of someone’s language ability.

...Of all the tasks graduates carry out at post in the foreign language ordinary conversation is the one area of language use in which they unanimously claim to experience the most difficulty, noting specifically problems in following the threads of conversations in multigroup settings.
...

They probably just needed to work through the FSI course again

[Cainntear]

What do you say to those who use the idea of "muscle memory" as an explanation to this?

Martial arts training seems to be a popular analogy for describing speech production as a muscle (or network of muscles) that needs forms to be drilled in order to expect reliable and automatic execution when it counts.

If this is a valid point, it would seem FSI-type drills would be ideal for the serious language learner.

Pronunciation is a muscle skill, but there's far more to speaking than pronouncing.
In fact, the muscle-memory analogy is kind of where the Army Method started, and it has been roundly disregarded by the academic community since.

But martial arts is a better analogy, because standing in a room punching the air shotokan-style will never teach you how to fight. A combat-oriented martial arts class will have you punch something -- whether it's a tree (redwoods are pretty good at absorbing the impact without hurting your hands or a pad, the feedback is required to teach you how to properly put weight into the punch. But this still isn't enough if you really want to be able to fight. Some martial arts classes will train you in choreographed set-pieces, which is a step up, but it still doesn't teach you how to react to someone who isn't following the same dance-sheet as you. Learning to fight means learning to react to the unexpected in your opponent, and that only happens when you start sparring and both combatants are making genuine attempts to win. Of course, when your sensei or sifu spots a weakness in your technique, they can drill the things you need to overcome that weakness and use muscle memory to do that, but it has to be focused work for a specific reason -- you can't just drill every movement and hope that the unsui will pull off the right one in the heat of combat.

The other reason I find "muscle memory" unconvincing is that if by "muscle memory" you mean the same thing that means I can still play tunes on the guitar I haven't played for months or years, then muscle memory isn't really generalisable. My skill on a few specific pieces is better than my improvised playing by several orders of magnitude. And yet, if I learn a song in a foreign language, my ability to remember the song is very closely related to my ability to produce spontaneous speech in the language. The less well I know the language, the more often I need to sing it to remember it. The only song I can remember in Spanish at the moment is "Por Una Cabeza", not just because it's short, but because the grammar and structure used matches what I've already internalised, even if some of the specific vocab is a bit unusual.

In short, language is just too complex for muscle memory.

[jsega]

So based on your last reply, would you agree then (as some have already advocated) that drills in language learning are efficient as a targeted approach based upon useful feedback rather than used as a blanket approach to learning?

[Cainntear]

So based on your last reply, would you agree then (as some have already advocated) that drills in language learning are efficient as a targeted approach based upon useful feedback rather than used as a blanket approach to learning?

That's a definite "maybe".

It still leaves open the classic problem with what's called "delayed correction" (the teacher saves all the errors for the end of the class and goes over them in one go) -- very often students immediately know how to produce the correct form once you start the discussion, and you'll often hear them comment that they know how to do it then, they just can't do it on-the-fly. (Delayed correction seems to have lost favour during the decade since I got my CELTA certificate for just this reason.)

If a student can do the drill perfectly, but doesn't apply the rule correctly in conversation, more drilling can't be the solution.

[reineke]

I know that when I was at high school we did a lot of drill-based learning, and I put a lot of effort into trying to draw meaning from all the tasks, rather than following the tasks mechanically; but you shouldn't have to force yourself to do that -- the materials should always reward doing it right.

I'm not sure meaning is really that significant for the effectiveness of the drills. The only language where I've ever spent time on seemingly pointless mechanical drills without caring about it at all is English - those were mandatory English classes in German high school and I just couldn't wriggle my way out of doing those damn boring grammar drills. I've done surely about 4 or 5 whole books of grammar drills during high school. English is also the only one of my languages where I have a good grasp on basically all of the grammar and have complete automaticity on all aspects of it. I probably know more about English grammar than about German grammar actually.
...

2. FSI is an efficient method to get to good levels of grammatically correct production, at least according to everyone who has actually finished the whole thing. Oodles of correct input might get you there too eventually, but it will take substantially longer than 90h! More like 9000h. In Spanish I have had about 350h of not too grammar heavy language classes - very few grammar drills, because you don't torture paying customers. I have read thousands of pages with different difficulty levels and genres. Make that another 300h at least. I have also watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of TV - probably around 500h-700h. I have even heard Spanish spoken every single day on the street for 2 years now. That's 1000h of input at least +classes. And I still make mistakes with fairly common subjunctives!!! It drives me nuts! I know when I make a mistake thanks to all the input, but I still make the damn mistakes anyway, probably due to some deeply ingrained bad habits from starting to speak too early. Next year I'll try to do FSI Spanish. Maybe that will finally sort it out

The Acquisition and Teaching of the Spanish Subjunctive

For learners of Spanish the acquisition of the subjunctive forms and their meaning continues to be one of the benchmarks of success. Even though the literature contains a good amount of research on the subjunctive in first (L1), second (L2) and foreign language (FL) contexts suggesting it is acquired late, contemporary textbooks still give teachers and learners the impression that the subjunctive is so important to communicative goals that its study deserves large proportions of textbook pages and class time. Grammarians have suspected for a number of years that the subjunctive’s frequency in the input that learners might hear or read is relatively low (cf. Collentine 1995). Corpus tools can quickly provide a realistic estimate of the relative proportion of verb forms that learners will face that are in the subjunctive. Figure 1 (page 40) presents an analysis of the frequency of 2,085,990 verb forms in the Corpus del español, a corpus of more than 21,000,000 words comprising native-speaker samples of both written and spoken Spanish from a variety of registers (Biber et al. 2006). The data suggest that, whether in oral or written language, the proportion of subjunctive forms native speakers produce is small compared to other paradigms/conjugations, such as the present indicative, imperfect, or preterit. This analysis shows that the subjunctive, whether in the present or the imperfect, comprises only about 7.2% of all verb forms. Of course, this perspective ignores the sociolinguistics of the subjunctive, which has a certain valuation among many Spanish speakers such that it serves as a marker of a variety of variables, such as level of education...

In this article I provide an update on the state of the art of the research—the last one being Collentine (2003)—on the acquisition of the subjunctive paradigm and its meanings and the research’s implications for pedagogy. There has been much research conducted in the past six years on the acquisition of the subjunctive and mood selection. This aspect of Spanish grammar is not so much studied as of late for understanding the acquisition of the subjunctive for the subjunctive’s sake. Instead, it has become an important construct for studies attempting to understand more general L2 developmental issues, such as the role of universal grammar (UG) as well as input. I conclude with recommendations for curriculum and materials designers as well as for future investigations.

Herschensohn, and Gess (2003) demonstrate how form-focused instruction coupled with in-struction heightening learners’ sensitivity to the phonology of French gender agreement can be highly effective at fostering the learning of this construct. To the extent that the subjunctive’s phonological features are often as subtle as the use or deletion of a consonant (as is often also the case with adjectival agreement in French), investigating the utility of a phonological design...

...moving-window, eye-tracking, and event-related potential techniques (may) tell us about how or whether beginning learners notice the subjunctive in written input."

Hispania 93.1 (2010): 39–51 AATSP

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... 3Gx2wy3Nbw

[Systematiker]

I'll chime in here:

My Spanish is pretty unbalanced. I watch film and listen to podcasts and lectures without missing anything. I read novels and nonfiction in my fields as well as areas of interest and I can measure unknown words per 100 pages and still be in the single digits. I can write, at least in text messages, pretty well, though not as well as that level of comprehension might lead one to expect.

And in the last three weeks, I've had two drop-of-the-hat conversations in Spanish where I'm lucky if I expressed myself at B2.

So I got irritated about this yesterday, and I've begun a process by which by the end of March I will have shadowed every dialogue and done every oral drill in the whole of the FSI Spanish program by the end of the month. I'm not learning anything new - I know all these words, and I know all this grammar, at least in theory. But it damn well better automate my production. I think (and hope!) that Blaurebell's #2 is correct. I'll find out.

This makes me curious for some more context. Do you speak on a daily basis (I'm assuming not based on your wording but I just want it to be clear)?

I don't have the chance to speak Spanish daily, no. I usually do around an hour or so of podcasts in Spanish almost every day, and watch several hours weekly, as well as doing a pretty good amount of reading. The conversation opportunity isn't really there - every week or so I have a chance to do a few 3-4 sentence exchanges with someone, and less often a longer conversation on something pastoral. For the latter, I do a lot better having "charged up", that is, read and listened for a couple hours prior to it, but it's only sometimes foreseeable. Actually, having Spanish at my fingertips is part of what I've wanted to address for a while now.

The two problematic conversations were neither of these - they were more in-depth cordial or collegial conversations that were across "normal" topics and not restricted to my wheelhouse. I did catch myself making mistakes, and sometimes was able to correct it immediately upon hearing myself screw up. Both times I had trouble with reported speech, and telling a story about something that happened, too.

Well, I've still got units 9 and 10 lined up for tonight...

Interestingly, I did have one of those short exchanges in Spanish today, and did feel less hesitant discussing pine mulch and why I didn't want the damaged bags - but whether that's placebo or an effect of drilling other stuff, I can't tell.

An edit: being nine units in, I'd also like to remark that it's a strain. I can answer the drills at speed nearly all of the time (sometimes the audio isn't clear and I don't get the prompt, or earlier today, road noise interferes), but it's a noticeable effort (and not devoid of meaning, even if the meaning is isolated a bit; I'm processing things as Spanish and occasionally interjecting my own comments to the tape while the correct response comes or giving a smart-aleck answer instead of the desired response. Of course I do that sparingly, but it's still spontaneous Spanish output, so it can't be too bad).

[blaurebell]

What you've presented here is two extreme viewpoints and presented them as natural alternatives to each other, but there are lots of midpoints you've left out. "Oodles of correct input" is not the only alternative to oodles of mechanical drills.

Totally agreed. I've left out the midpoints because FSI is an extreme example. The content is pretty much only relevant to a very small subset of people so that it's basically grammar drilling only for everyone else. But then I don't know whether the alternatives among the formal language course I didn't mention are really so compelling either. Standard language courses overstrain the learner with dialogues that are beyond their production or comprehension capabilities, overloading them with too much grammar and vocabulary. Alternatively they are right at the production level and are so damn childish and boring that I feel not taken seriously. It's just so difficult to get the pacing and difficulty level right, especially since every learner is different. That's probably why the drop out rate is pretty high with all language courses, learner and course just don't match in their requirements. Either it's too boring or too hard, because the sweet spot in pacing and difficulty is different for everyone out there. It's damn disappointing that there still aren't any computer based approaches that really adjust to the learning preferences of the learner! After all, they manage pretty well to adjust difficulty levels in gaming nowadays, why not in language learning?

To be honest, I think the biggest advantage of Assimil is that comprehension and production runs at a different pace. That definitely gets rid of some of the boredom vs overstraining difficulties. And I don't know of any other course that takes this route, I wonder why? I could imagine a pretty interesting course that would start out like Assimil but introduces very easy and limited drilling 25% in and then increases the number of drills and production exercises over time. I'm trying to simulate that to some extent with Duolingo, but since they've been dumbing their courses down a lot and reducing production it's not really ideal. This dumbing down is actually a sign that gamification isn't enough to take the drudgery and boredom out of drilling.

I've met lots of people who've gone through grammar-heavy courses and can do all the tasks, but fail in real production because while they can produce the grammar on demand from the teacher/book/CD/website, they can't do it when they're speaking. What is the problem here if it is not the failure to link the form with the meaning?

Again, totally agreed. To be honest that's due to "cheating" though. Connecting form and meaning is difficult, so the automatic tendency is to make things easier. It's not really the fault of the course designers if the students find a way of not using their brains properly. After all, supposedly they want to learn, right? There should be an initial paragraph in every workbook that tells learners to *think* about every single sentence, about the possible context, the reason why a drill is useful and so on. A bit silly that it needs to be said, but well. The path of least resistance is probably always the wrong path in language learning.

I learned my Spanish initially in a mostly production-based way, and my comprehension came as a natural consequence, because I knew both the form and the meaning of everything I said in practice.

Same here with Spanish. Completely production + interaction based approaches definitely work, that's also my experience. In fact the only things that worked for me were interaction based approaches and Assimil + Duolingo + intensive reading. The problem with interaction approaches is that one can really develop some nasty habits though by constantly trying to communicate at a level beyond the actual production capabilities - and that's the tendency because we are adults who have speaking needs beyond "I want milk". While winging more difficult to say things in Tarzan Speak it's totally possible to develop such deeply ingrained mistakes that they are nearly impossible to correct later on. My mum makes some pretty obvious mistakes in German in some of her most commonly used standard sentences. She got in the habit of saying them before she could figure out that there are mistakes in them and she might not even make the same mistakes in any of her "new" sentences. I spent some of my teenage years trying to correct her, but it made no difference. Habits are just so difficult to modify! The mistakes become like grooves and we always fall into them, because we reinforce them every time we make them. That's why I never repeated my full immersion from zero experiment after Spanish. I feel like it left a mark, even though I can communicate fluently in everyday situations without much difficulty. The bad habits and gaps become pretty obvious during longer conversations though.

Comprehension with interaction based approaches comes pretty naturally, definitely, but probably at a slower pace and with far wider gaps than if you take the Assimil + intensive reading route. I've only done interaction + listening + extensive reading with Spanish and I feel like my comprehension now lacks precision, especially with literary language. Assimil + intensive reading is a pretty cool short cut for quick and precise comprehension in my opinion, especially for languages where you're unlikely to communicate much. Otherwise the "easy way out" with this one is to never even do the active wave and ignore the production side altogether. Definitely the case with my French, although my comprehension is at a good level there even with very literary language. I'm fine with that for now because I don't really need to speak it at the moment, but my production lags really super far behind with this one.

The best path is probably one that combines a few very different approaches and combines all their strengths. Assimil + intensive reading + listening, followed by FSI, followed by lots of focused interaction maybe? But then, it really depends on what the learner needs and likes to know how to start. I need to have fun with a language early on and communicating in Tarzan speak isn't fun for me, I'm too much of a perfectionist with anxiety issues for that I prefer to read and watch movies. People who don't care much for that kind of engagement with a language - surprisingly many - will do best with early interaction, but probably need to take special care to drill more to counteract possible pervasive early mistakes. Grammar nerds will love FSI of course, but it's probably a bad first course for the vast majority of learners.

As for the rest of the courses: They are pretty much drudgery and ineffective awfulness wrapped in more or less shiny packages, usually moving at a completely wrong pace for me - usually both with the comprehension side being to boring and the production side too difficult, worst combination. I hated pretty much every single standard language course I tried and abandoned them early on unless I was forced by exam requirements. And that's what the vast majority of self-motivated language learners does as well unless they have some pretty exceptional levels of discipline. It's amazing how boring, ineffective and frustrating most language courses are and that there has been pretty much no improvement in the last 50 years apart from "more pictures and cartoons". Even computer based learning, which could be so amazing, has been mainly drilling based with some pretty dismal "standard boring language course on the screen" attempts. The gamified version - Duolingo - is also just a collection of more or less idiotic and useless sentences without context or relevance only helpful for fast passive exposure to lots of examples of grammar structures and vocabulary in context. Disappointing! Isn't it pretty amazing that we still have to resort to boring FSI drudgery in this day and age because all other approaches fail us in one way or another?

Sorry for the lengthy rambling half rant, but this actually annoys me a lot. There must be some way of taking the drudgery out of drills beyond gamification!

[Cainntear]

I've met lots of people who've gone through grammar-heavy courses and can do all the tasks, but fail in real production because while they can produce the grammar on demand from the teacher/book/CD/website, they can't do it when they're speaking. What is the problem here if it is not the failure to link the form with the meaning?

Again, totally agreed. To be honest that's due to "cheating" though. Connecting form and meaning is difficult, so the automatic tendency is to make things easier. It's not really the fault of the course designers if the students find a way of not using their brains properly. After all, supposedly they want to learn, right? There should be an initial paragraph in every workbook that tells learners to *think* about every single sentence, about the possible context, the reason why a drill is useful and so on. A bit silly that it needs to be said, but well. The path of least resistance is probably always the wrong path in language learning.

If by "cheating" you mean "being human", I agree.
Because the human brain has evolved to identify patterns and determine the simplest way of thinking about something.

In the real world, you get real stimulus and real response, and your brain connects the stimulus, your response, and the feedback you receive on it.

Once you go into a classroom, the danger is that differences from the natural environment mean that the relationship between stimulus, response and feedback is different, and as soon as that feedback is different, what you learn changes.

In a simplistic form, this is the justification for so-called "natural" and "communicative" approaches to language learning, but it's more complicated than that, because even natural and communicative classrooms are unnatural.

Completely production + interaction based approaches definitely work, that's also my experience. In fact the only things that worked for me were interaction based approaches and Assimil + Duolingo + intensive reading. The problem with interaction approaches is that one can really develop some nasty habits though by constantly trying to communicate at a level beyond the actual production capabilities - and that's the tendency because we are adults who have speaking needs beyond "I want milk".

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.


While winging more difficult to say things in Tarzan Speak it's totally possible to develop such deeply ingrained mistakes that they are nearly impossible to correct later on. My mum makes some pretty obvious mistakes in German in some of her most commonly used standard sentences. She got in the habit of saying them before she could figure out that there are mistakes in them and she might not even make the same mistakes in any of her "new" sentences. I spent some of my teenage years trying to correct her, but it made no difference. Habits are just so difficult to modify! The mistakes become like grooves and we always fall into them, because we reinforce them every time we make them. That's why I never repeated my full immersion from zero experiment after Spanish. I feel like it left a mark, even though I can communicate fluently in everyday situations without much difficulty. The bad habits and gaps become pretty obvious during longer conversations though.

Comprehension with interaction based approaches comes pretty naturally, definitely, but probably at a slower pace and with far wider gaps than if you take the Assimil + intensive reading route. I've only done interaction + listening + extensive reading with Spanish and I feel like my comprehension now lacks precision, especially with literary language. Assimil + intensive reading is a pretty cool short cut for quick and precise comprehension in my opinion, especially for languages where you're unlikely to communicate much. Otherwise the "easy way out" with this one is to never even do the active wave and ignore the production side altogether. Definitely the case with my French, although my comprehension is at a good level there even with very literary language. I'm fine with that for now because I don't really need to speak it at the moment, but my production lags really super far behind with this one.

The best path is probably one that combines a few very different approaches and combines all their strengths. Assimil + intensive reading + listening, followed by FSI, followed by lots of focused interaction maybe? But then, it really depends on what the learner needs and likes to know how to start. I need to have fun with a language early on and communicating in Tarzan speak isn't fun for me, I'm too much of a perfectionist with anxiety issues for that I prefer to read and watch movies. People who don't care much for that kind of engagement with a language - surprisingly many - will do best with early interaction, but probably need to take special care to drill more to counteract possible pervasive early mistakes. Grammar nerds will love FSI of course, but it's probably a bad first course for the vast majority of learners.

Have a look at the following, which is a little under three minutes from the advanced French course.

]I don't know where it is je ne sais pas où c'est
I don't know what it is je ne sais pas ce que c'est
to explain éxpliquer
can you explain to me what it is? pouvez-vous m'éxpliquer ce que c'est?
what do you want? qu'est-ce que vous voulez?
what do you want to do? qu'est-ce que vous voulez faire?
what do you want to say? qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire?
what do you mean? qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire?
I don't understand what you mean je ne comprends pas ce que vous voulez dire
can explain to me what you mean? pouvez-vous m'éxpliquer ce que vous voulez dire?
that's not what I mean ce n'est pas ce que je veux dire
what do you mean? qu'est-ce que vous-voulez dire?
it means ça veut dire
what does it mean? qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?
I don't understand what it means je ne comprends pas ce que ça veut dire
I want je veux
I'm going je vais
I want it je le veux
I don't want it je ne le veux pas
I want some, I want some of it j'en veux
I don't want any je n'en veux pas
that's not what I mean ce n'est pas ce que je veux dire
I don't know what it means je ne sais pas ce que ça veut dire

I know of no other course that provides that much variety and diversity in such a short space of time. Notice how different each prompt/response is from the last. If you think about changing "variables" in a sentence, most consecutive exercises differ by several variables (although some do by only one, eg qu'est-ce que vous voulez faire -> qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire). Also, there's only one point where three consecutive responses differ by a single variable: qu'est-ce que vous voulez faire -> qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire -> qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire. Even that is arguably more complex than that because we're switching the verb in the native language prompt (want to say -> mean) for a different meaning but where the target language response is the same.

Sorry for the lengthy rambling half rant, but this actually annoys me a lot. There must be some way of taking the drudgery out of drills beyond gamification!

Yup, and the answer is variety and complexity. As long as tasks are repetitive, they will be boring. They will be boring because they allow meaningless mechanical processing. Variety and complexity force you to think, and stop the mechanical grind.

Now you might think that the problems with interactional lessons (e.g. the communicative approach) show that complexity is bad, they don't -- they just prove that there's no point using complex examples if the student hasn't acquired the complex rules underlying them.