Speakeasy wrote:Cainntear wrote: Funnily enough, some other people might say the same thing about the many repetitive threads about comprehensive input, for example, or even, dare I say it, audiolingual courses, but we all have different preferences, don’t we? The site would be very different if we all lived in our own little silos...
I agree with you completely … uh, er, I think. In fact, I am on record in this forum as having pleaded numerous times – without apparent success – for a
truce on the incessant debates over the audio-lingual method and its most-often-disparaged application, the FSI Basic courses, the Michel Thomas method, and the Pimsleur programme. It disheartens me that some people are incapable of displaying tolerance for other people’s preferences in language-learning materials. The most recent discussions under the “Language Transfer” discussion thread are illustrative … a veritable fight to the death over such a minor issue!
I took a temporary break from the Language Transfer thread, because it was getting upsetting. Why we (and of course I know I am not innocent here) feel the need to trash things we don't understand in our current society is an interesting question.
People can believe what they want, but I know from personal experience that a lot of things are very helpful if you don't make them your "one true" method and I think just dismissing them as worse than useless when you clearly don't understand what they are doing sometimes dances quite close to being a little irresponsible on a forum that has as one of its most important goals to help newbies learn their first L2.
Michel Thomas and Language Transfer style courses, Pimsleur, Audiolingual drills, large amounts of input, traditional courses, native content, output, Anki reps, shadowing dialogues, extensive reading... I use them all (except for extensive reading in Chinese, for obvious reasons) and they have all helped me. As far as I can see, all successful language learners I know of are pragmatic and flexible, using the right tool for their current goal and personal preferences and using it at the right time and in the right combinations.
Even as an English teacher, I have seen something similar. My first job was for a company that believed in drilling the hell out of everything and insisted their teachers correct every mistake. Some students were able to successfully use these drills as a tool, but mostly the results were not great and I didn't really like it very much (however I got to live in Madrid off the back of it, which was great). My current school is the complete opposite. I've been here a month and they are all about just setting up "communicative" activity after "communicative" activity with little attention paid to accuracy. From what I've seen so far the results are even worse IMO and TBH I despise it even more.
In between those I had a job for a school that, yes, paid lip-service to the above approach (apparently this is fetish of the decade in TEFL), but in practice weren't dogmatic about it and mostly encouraged teachers to be responsible for their classes and tried to give teachers as many different tools as possible to be pragmatic and flexible in the classroom. The results were far from perfect, but much, much better.
