Classroom Course Materials vs. Self-Instruction Course Materials

[Chung]

Chung, with the deepest respect, I do not think that anyone would even bother offering a counter-argument to your comments concerning the greater depth-of-coverage of a whole series of classroom course materials which ordinarily culminate at levels of B1 and higher, over those such as the Teach Yourself series or the Colloquial series both of which ordinarily go no further than A1, because doing so would involve embarking on a discussion of a false comparison. For the same reason, I doubt that even the take-no-prisoners anti-audio-lingual methodologists would disagree with you concerning the greater mass of exercises which are available in the Polish, Slovak, and Finnish courses that you cited when compared to tourist-level courses. In other words, while I agree with you that the courses that you mentioned are of the highest quality, I would point out that they are out-of-print, they are no longer current, they are not widely used (even Professor Swan abandoned the use of his own audio-lingual courses) and they do not reflect the mainstream materials that have been inflicted upon students taking classroom language courses over the past three decades.

EDITED:
Typos.

Well, when you move away from FIGS and other big-name languages, your choices are limited, to put it mildly. "Linguaphone Slovak"? Hah! "Assimil Polonais sans peine"? $99?! Fuggedaboutit (at least I know French, so I could have used it, but what happens when you don't know French?).

What iguanamon does is more than I would do to start learning a language. Unless it were a matter of life and death, I wouldn't bother to learn some language/creole for the hell of it on realizing that a translated Bible is the most readily-available source of authentic material, and/or seeing that all that's available resembling a course for beginners is an old book from FSI/DLI with scratchy audio. I really do need to get my hands on a fairly up-to-date starter course (I use the end of the era of détente as a cut-off point) that checks my boxes, so to speak, regardless of whether it's actually meant for a classroom or not. I'm comfortable with that, and maybe it's one of life's oddities, but I didn't see the serious dearth of resources for Northern Saami to be an obstacle once I knew enough Finnish, and so filled my luggage in Lapland with a solid set of starter materials in the language. I hesitate with Haitian Creole even though I speak French and can decipher a lot of it when it's spoken slowly or I read aloud a text of it.

If someone here knowing only English wants to start learning Slovak independently, the easy way out is a choice is between "Colloquial Slovak" and the online Slovake.eu (if he or she is OK with an online course). It's true that Swan's course is out of print (or more accurately, the course with the all-important audio for the self-learner is still available but for around a couple hundred bucks via Amazon while the textbook alone is usually obtainable through the same for about $30). False comparison or not, those aren't really great options but whadd'ya gonna do? While well-designed, the other Slovak textbooks that I mention which are available and up-to-date are meant for the classroom, and so not my first choice to the autodidact who's a rank beginner given that all the explanations and instructions are in Slovak. He/she definitely needs a tutor or native Slovak to help out, if attending a class is impractical.

In fairness, I've run into a few promising alternatives in the self-instruction market for some of my target languages (e.g "Spoken World Polish") but they're not easy to find unless you have someone guiding you before you start. People wanting to learn FIGS or other big-name languages have it easy in comparison and have more leeway to be picky. When you're a rookie wanting to learn your first foreign language, it's hard to make a choice based on what you see in Google hits or on the shelf at Barnes and Noble without resorting to what has the most stars on Google or Amazon or what's cheapest. The reality is that for a lot of people in the English-speaking world, you and I know that they don't know anything more than Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Duolingo, Teach Yourself and Colloquial. Hell, you also know that Living Language's new-fangled "Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced" series for about a dozen popular foreign languages is a repackaging of its older "Beginner-Intermediate" courses. Good luck finding the proper "Advanced" courses with their 6-8 cassettes covering something like B1 unless you shell out a few hundred bucks for a second-hand copy.

[tiia]

In other words, while I agree with you that the courses that you mentioned are of the highest quality, I would point out that they are out-of-print, they are no longer current, they are not widely used (even Professor Swan abandoned the use of his own audio-lingual courses) and they do not reflect the mainstream materials that have been inflicted upon students taking classroom language courses over the past three decades.

At least Suomen Mestari is a rather new course that is used right now widely among Finnish learners. Finnish for Forgeigners still tells me something, but I haven't used it. Might be a bit older. But the other courses... I don't know.

[Cavesa]

Chung's post is great as usual. We need to keep on mind the differences between the individual target languages

4) Learning material that uses English as the intermediary language gets priority, but I will get stuff issued in Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak or even Russian, if worthwhile (I admit that I'd be damned if I could find top-notch language-learning material for beginners published in Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Slovak when there's stuff already available in English, French, German or Russian. Textbooks published in Finnish, however, are still the realistic choice for me right now whenever I'll get back to studying Northern Saami or Inari Saami).[/size]

Yes, you can, but only for certain languages.

There are Czech based courses that can easily rival and even win over Teach Yourself or Colloquial, and perhaps Assimil (comparing to Assimil is more problematic. Comparing these courses to TY and Colloquial is like a skiing race. Assimil is riding a bike):

Francouzština nejen pro samouky (A1-B1) and Francouzština nejen pro pokročilé samouky (B1-C1) volumes 1 and 2 published by Leda:
Very good, comprehensive, systematic,tons of useful material, exercises with key, good quality audio. Needs to be supplemented with authentic input, and doesn't focus much on writing, but both can be said about most classroom courses. Of course you need more to truly get to the levels in all the aspects, but they give you all the theoretical base for the levels and a lot of practical stuff too.

Němčina nejen pro samouky, Švédština nejen pro samouky, and a few others from the series are excellent. Not all of them, true.

Učebnice současné Španělštiny/Italštiny/Ruštiny (volume 1 to B1, volume 2 to C1) by CPress
Very good, a bit nicer format than the previous ones, less "concentrated".

Italština by Leda, one volume up to B2 (They also offer a few more similar books)
A really fast pace, tons of drills

Fiesta 1 (A1-2), 2 (B1 and B2), 3 (B2/C1), published by Fraus (not to be confused with a monolingual series of the same name)
The best "hybrid" between the self-instruction and classroom aimed courses I've ever seen.

I'll take these over a TY or Colloquial any day (and usually alongside a monolingual classroom course), the base language is not an issue for me. This whole list consists of books that cover more ground, explain stuff to more detail, and give a lot more exercises.

Of course, this doesn't mean Czech as a whole can "win" against the sum of all the English, French, German, and Italian based resources, sure. That is a funny idea. But as far as self-instruction courses go (the classroom aimed one to a much lesser extent, the publishers have almost given up on those in the compeition against the foreign publishers), they publishers have been improving the offer a lot, aiming not only at the less knowledgeable part of the market going after colourful crap courses, but also on the ambitious learners, usually disappointed by the classes and the mainstream classroom coursebooks.
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To reiterate, it just depends for me. I look at any prospective set of material running through that list of 4 points in big font rather than judging a book by its cover and favoring by default a textbook that's designated/advertised for self-instruction over one for the classroom. I'm also for complementing material - especially when the choice is there. .

Exactly. I think too many people choose based on marketing and prejudices. And the bad thing is, that the prejudices do not disappear with more information being available on the internet now. Posts like yours should be reposted all over the internet

In other words, while I agree with you that the courses that you mentioned are of the highest quality, I would point out that they are out-of-print, they are no longer current, they are not widely used (even Professor Swan abandoned the use of his own audio-lingual courses) and they do not reflect the mainstream materials that have been inflicted upon students taking classroom language courses over the past three decades.

[/quote]
True.

And that is a part of the prejudices I am talking about, they are based on some experience. A collective bad experience, that persists over some time. Not that many years ago, I would have told you all the monolingual mainstream classrooom courses were laughable and impractical compared to the self-study ones. Well, the market really looked like it at some point. It has been developping since.

Fortunately, I think the pendulum that had abandoned the serious resources Chung praises and went to the too light hearted excuses for coursebooks has been returning closer to the middle.

The old resources tend to be great and combine what we often name as the advantages of the classroom courses and self-instuction ones. THey tend to be serious, comprehensive, with tons of exercises, and also audio. However, they come with their own set of challenges and I am glad to see new resources with similar approach and goals.

edit: fixed wrong formatting

[David1917]

I have quite a lot of experience with applying knowledge from self study to conversation in the real life. A teacher is absolutely not necessary for that. So, I don't think it is such a valid point. After all, the self-instruction language books are focused on conversation as well, just usually through different kinds of activities. That's why one kind of the books can fit a certain learner more than the other.

But I dislike the prejudice that the self-teaching learners are not aiming for CEFR levels or ambitious goals. I think this prejudice is very harmful.

Enrolling in a class doesn't gurantee anything, I'd say the teachers are the most overestimated and overpriced kind of resource on the market. A good classroom aimed course can balance out a bad teacher (it is very common to hear from people in classes "well, I wish I had bought just the book", it is the most common in the group classes preparing for the cefr exams). A not too good book can't do that and the students suffer.

I guess the distinction I was trying to make was that if someone were to enroll into a course claiming to take you to B2, you should be able to sit that test the very last day of your course and pass. If you engage in self-study with Assimil, which claims to take you to B2 and the day after you complete Lesson 100 in the second wave, you should be able to sit the B2 and pass.

Which one of those sounds more likely to be true? The 2nd is almost an impossibility without actually having improvised conversations with people, nor without having read/listened to longer passages on specialized topics. Of course, one could engage in these things on their own and pass the test with flying colors, but that is beyond the scope of this strict comparison. Now, the fact is that yes many teachers are overestimated and overpriced (see comments on another thread about how East Asian countries will hire any native English speaker to "teach English" regardless of any qualification).

The intermediate/advanced are not precise at all. Just look at the new Living Language series, their "advanced" courses are at most A2. And that is just one example among many.

Right but, at least they are not misleading by tying themselves to a strictly defined level. In America or England, A2 is certainly advanced

I would say the difference between the focus on CEFR levels and not that much of it (for example Assimil is one book giving some knowledge up to B1, officially B2, but B1 is the general experience around this forum, if I am not mistaken) is not one of them being superior. Or one being for the ambitious learners that pay the classes (a large part of this forum is a proof that self-study is superior to being hand held by a teacher in a classroom) and the other for some lazy people buying self-instruction courses just wanting touristy phrases. The self-instructed learners have high goals too, and speaking skills are among them.

As I have said, the CEFR and "conversation" focus comes with disadvantages. Vast majority of the French beginners I've ever met were horrified after the first few lessons. Why? This attitude of the course makers introduced them to a chaos of "useful" phrases long before giving them the grammar apparatus to understand them and construct them. The result: "I should give up, French is illogical and just about memorisation". The courses for autodidacts are usually much more reasonable about this. And they teach the conversation situations too.

Also, if the self-instruction books are not focused on speaking, as you claim, what are the people trying to learn then?

I agree with everything here, but we're steering towards the conversation of "teacher vs. self-study" which most here would agree that self-study is superior. My intention was to say that a classroom course based on a CEFR level is designed to be used in conjunction with a professional who can guide your mistakes and provide the necessary conversation practice to guarantee your success on the exam. Therefore, without that component, a classroom course would be insufficient on its own. A self-study book is intended to prepare you to converse, and ideally would include enough information and practice to get the student feeling confident enough to go out there and do just that.

[Axon]

The only language that I've really used courses for extensively is Vietnamese. When thinking about this question, my mind naturally went to the astoundingly good Elementary Vietnamese textbook by Binh Nhu Ngo, but on actually comparing it to other coursebooks I have, the answer isn't quite so clear.

EV opens with 25 pages of extremely exhaustive pronunciation drills, while Teach Yourself Vietnamese's drills cover a handful of pages and the most common minimal pair contrasts. TY frequently asks you to translate between Vietnamese and English, while EV just has you manipulate Vietnamese sentences to produce negatives, questions, etc.

The explanatory notes are naturally more complete in EV as it's a classroom text, and they're all fully recorded with an English narrator and two native Vietnamese speakers. The grammar notes in TY are written in a far more conversational style ("Let's discuss some examples using sentences containing là") while in EV they're in a more detached observational style. From the handful of things I looked at, EV tends to explain in more detail. Here's one of the most egregious examples, from late in both books:

TY: Nhau means 'each other.'
[Example: They love each other.]
EV: The reciprocal pronoun nhau "each other, one another" placed after a verb indicates mutual action.
[Example: They help each other do their homework.]
When the verb demands a preposition, the preposition is placed after the verb and before the reciprocal pronoun nhau.
[Example: Occasionally they write letters to each other.]

The TY chapters are all about people going to Vietnam, doing tourist things, and chatting with friends there. The EV topics are virtually all conversations between university students at first, and only after chapter 10 do you start getting topics like "shopping" and "having a meal." Of course by this point the language is more advanced, such as having characters explain to each other how to use chopsticks and comparing different flavors.

As the books progress, the EV chapters become quite long, introducing examples of formal written Vietnamese halfway through as well as extensive grammar notes and truly staggering amounts of drills. The dialogues become more complicated in later TY chapters, though the notes and exercises remain roughly consistent.

Notably for the self-learner, Teach Yourself contains an answer key while Elementary Vietnamese does not. However the index/glossary in EV is cross-referenced so that you can look up any word in the text and find not only its definition but also where it was first introduced and explained.

There are two male and two female voice actors for TY, though I really didn't like one of them because it sounded like they had a stuffed nose. EV has one male and one female. There's one short section on Chinese loanwords and they have a Mandarin speaker do those recordings too.

In conclusion, I really should study these books more because there's a lot I still need to learn. I am not the kind of person to sit down and do more than a handful of grammar drills. For this reason, Teach Yourself courses have lost me in the past because, being based on communicative needs, they tend to introduce several new things each lesson that need reinforcement. Elementary Vietnamese moves quite slowly, such that as long as you listen to the dialogues, remember most of the words in the vocabulary section, and read the grammar notes, you can skip the drills and not be lost upon starting the next chapter.

I estimate that each book would take the learner to somewhere around A2 on its own, and if you used them together you would likely be at a high B1 level from the combination of EV's more advanced vocabulary and TY's emphasis on handling different communicative scenarios. What you lose in not having answers to EV's exercises, you gain in rigorous pronunciation training and in-depth explanations of grammar.

EDIT:
I dug out a copy of Vietnamese for Beginners by Paiboon Publishing. I had glanced at it years ago and tossed it aside. My loss. On the back it says "effective for independent self-study or classroom use" though inside it makes frequent reference to "your teacher." (It also says "written using beautiful Vietnamese script" which is nonsense - Vietnamese uses the Latin script with diacritics, and there's not a hint of the traditional demotic script)

Aside from that, it's another book with chapters organized by communicative goals presented through dialogues and grammar notes (Appearances, Distances, "Not Yet," Imperatives...). It does this really well, though, in my opinion. The dialogues are long, the grammar notes are clear and concise, and each chapter includes a "sentences" section of about 30-75 sentences illustrating the grammar and vocabulary. This is fantastic for an isolating language like Vietnamese. Furthermore the Appendix includes a phrasebook of the type you might see in a travel guide, only more complete and with clear examples of different variations.

There's no attention paid to reading or writing any kind of connected text - despite what the back cover says this is a book for conversations only. Each chapter also introduces way too many new words at once. You definitely need to go over each lesson several times to internalize all the new material. Pronunciation takes a bit of a backseat, and the whole book is in the Southern dialect (very common in diaspora communities but not the official standard in Vietnam) without actually mentioning that fact.

I estimate that this book alone would just about cover A1 in conversation, but a learner would have no experience reading even basic texts and no familiarity with words or constructions typically used in written Vietnamese. This seems to be pretty representative of what others have been saying about self-instruction books skipping a lot of necessary material, while also being a pretty good source for audio recordings.

[Cavesa]

I guess the distinction I was trying to make was that if someone were to enroll into a course claiming to take you to B2, you should be able to sit that test the very last day of your course and pass. If you engage in self-study with Assimil, which claims to take you to B2 and the day after you complete Lesson 100 in the second wave, you should be able to sit the B2 and pass.

Which one of those sounds more likely to be true? The 2nd is almost an impossibility without actually having improvised conversations with people, nor without having read/listened to longer passages on specialized topics. Of course, one could engage in these things on their own and pass the test with flying colors, but that is beyond the scope of this strict comparison. Now, the fact is that yes many teachers are overestimated and overpriced (see comments on another thread about how East Asian countries will hire any native English speaker to "teach English" regardless of any qualification).

Assimil doesn't take you to the level on its own, but it can get you there with other sources (At least in some languages, I cannot talk about the whole series). The same is true with the more precisely labeled classroom courses.

This is not about what sounds to be true, it is about the reality. Most people at the end of a B2 class, if they are the typical "teacher, do my job and drag me to the level, I'll be so kind to do a bit of homework you specify" kind (majority of learners), are unable to pass B2. As one example among many: My class at highschool was not like those usually described. Most people with IQ above 130, motivated, many aiming for universities abroad, and so on. The last year, we completed a B2 course (Édito, a very good coursebook in my opinion) and some supplementary material. Most were not able to pass the B2 by the end. All could have chosen French as one of their final exam subjects and passed with varying grades, but that would have been around B1 or barely B2. Several of us were at B2 and one or two C1. C1 were those with experience in francophone schools. B2 were those with lots of their own activities on top of the good quality B2 coursebook and a good teacher. I passed a B2 exam after these classes, but barely.

And that was an exception, better than many commercial language schools' classes. If what you say was true, there wouldn't be such a huge business around the DELF preparatory classes. If classes + classroom aimed coursess + teachers were such a guarantee of success, there would be few disappointed people, going for the more serious looking self-instruction courses as a remedy.

Really, neither of the two types of courses suffices on its own from B1 on. It is not fair to hold it against one and not against the other.

The intermediate/advanced are not precise at all. Just look at the new Living Language series, their "advanced" courses are at most A2. And that is just one example among many.

Right but, at least they are not misleading by tying themselves to a strictly defined level. In America or England, A2 is certainly advanced

A classical example of a situation, where the most common opinion is a common one and should be fixed, not abused.

I agree with everything here, but we're steering towards the conversation of "teacher vs. self-study" which most here would agree that self-study is superior. My intention was to say that a classroom course based on a CEFR level is designed to be used in conjunction with a professional who can guide your mistakes and provide the necessary conversation practice to guarantee your success on the exam. Therefore, without that component, a classroom course would be insufficient on its own. A self-study book is intended to prepare you to converse, and ideally would include enough information and practice to get the student feeling confident enough to go out there and do just that.

We are talking about use of the classroom aimed courses by self teaching learners, isn't this the main point of this thread? And of course it is possible.

I have heard the "well, I am glad we had this coursebook, the teacher was otherwise really bad and I wish I had self-studies" experience far too often. And no, the professional in a normal class is not such a guarantee, not even a good one. They would be against themselves, as they would miss out on the money for the more expensive exam preparation classes

No, a good self-study book is not just for the touristy small talk (that's what people seem to mean by "conversational" level usually). A good one aims to the high levels too, it just uses a different set of tools. It is traditionally much better at teaching grammar and vocabulary, while most classroom aimed coursebook require supplementary books (or a chaos of copies from them, if you have a teacher) is very often worse at these basics.

[Decidida]

If you are studying a rarer language with a lot of self-published books, and there is a single classroom textbook, no matter how crappy and expensive, it USUALLY will be more accurate for accents and spelling and grammar. And it can act that the table of contents to all the youtube videos and free pdfs and whatever scraps are available.