worst ways to learn a foreign language

[Kraut]

Talking about morphological complexity. This is the number "four" in Lithuanian: 7 cases in the feminine, and 7 in the masculine

[IronMike]

Thank you to Deinonysus for including the second half of this. Saved me from having to go to Quora.

[sirgregory]

That list, in that order, is most of the syllabus for an excellent class I took in college called "Theories of Language Learning and Teaching." All of us students were assigned a particular method to research and eventually demonstrate for the class. I did German by the Direct Method, and I remember experiencing Cantonese by The Silent Way (missing from her list). It was one of my favorite classes.

Perhaps entire courses using these methods have been "discarded as useless" but any language teacher with formal training has learned about the pluses and minuses of these methods in order to integrate them into their own lessons.

Quite simply, good teaching is varied and any method that presents one type of activity as the holiest of holies is not going to work.

What I find most distressing about this type of exercise is that it is apparently insufficient to promote the merits of some new approach in a field of human activity. For the exercise to be complete, whatever what was once deemed not only acceptable but actually quite progressive is subjected to being ritually discredited. To ensure compliant acceptance of what-is-new, anyone who chooses to adhere to the previous theories or practices is deemed to be an apostate and treated as such. This process extends to every area of human activity, not just to the theory of language learning.

These comments reminded me of something I just read called "On the mortality of language learning methods" by Wilfried Decoo. Decoo goes over some of the major trends since the late 19th century up through 2001 and notes the cyclical nature of methods being "discredited" and replaced with "new" methods every few decades.

A new method draws its originality and its force from a concept that is stressed above all others. Usually it is an easy to understand concept that speaks to the imagination.

- During the Reform Movement, the key word was "direct", in contrast to the detour of indirect theory.
- The Reading Method claimed that intensive reading was the obvious activity that language learners could constantly practice on their own, to better integrate language and strengthen the basis for the other skills.
- The audio movement stressed habit-formation, "like a child learns his mother tongue".
- The communicative approach used the key-words "functional", "real-world", "authentic", "proficiency", and the easy slogan: "Teach the language, not about the language."
- In the present, post-communicative approach, key concepts are "learner-centered", "content-based", "collaborative".

Typical is that such a single idea, which only represents a component, becomes the focal point as if being the total method. This publicity-rhetoric gives the impression of total reform, while often all that happens is a shift in accentuation, or the viewing from a different angle, because many common components remain included in each method.

To succeed, a new method must proclaim that current methods are a failure. That is not difficult to do, because language learning is a disappointing endeavor. For every successful language student, a dozen others have stopped along the road or find the end mark unsatisfactory. Only a small group finally breaks through and becomes fluent. It is therefore easy to claim that previous methods have failed, that the mastery of foreign languages is a national disaster, that students study a language for years and are still unable to order a meal or purchase bread.

The fact that methods are often identified with a single concept makes it easy to focus criticism on that concept. The audio-methods accused the former methods of being only grammatical or only concerned with reading, not speaking. The communicative approach hammered the audio-methods for being purely behaviorist and for training only lower-order skills. The present post-communicative trend reproves the communicative approach for being only functional and for neglecting the unique personality of each student.

Such critiques are often unfair, because methods are complex and quite often contain nearly all components. But each method pays the price for having publicized its uniqueness as a single concept, which in turn will be attacked by the following method.

Although the decline and death of a method is due to various factors, as described above, there is usually only one factor that history identifies and remembers as the cause of death, namely the (perceived) missing, or neglected component(s). We can read in introductions to new methods that

- the grammatical approach failed because it missed lively communication;
- the direct method failed because it neglected the backing of insight;
- the audio-methods failed because they neglected cognitive learning;
- the communicative methods are failing because they neglect careful progression and lower-order automatization.

One could even define a method as follows: "A language teaching method is an approach that neglects at least one important component." That deficiency is its Achilles heel, which will ultimately cause its death because criticism concentrates on that one neglected aspect.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090112010049/http://webh01.ua.ac.be/didascalia/mortality.htm

[Speakeasy]

@sirgregory, thank you for reviving this thread and for providing the additional quotes and link. Here’s one more:

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

I came across the above quote several decades ago, my eyes rolled! Although the quote is frequently and incorrectly attributed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter, Roman Satirist, c.27-66 AD, it seems to me that the very notion itself lies at the heart of the human condition. I can only imagine that good teachers, everywhere, groan collectively at the arrival of the “latest theories in teaching” the weight of which they find unbearable. Lesser teachers and administrators rejoice at the influx of new theories and methods as these are guaranteed -- scientifically, no less! -- to ensure effortless progress. Out with the old, in with the new!

[tussentaal]

What does she think about Glossika?
And is Glossika good for diglossic languages, or should, for them, be invented a new method, Diglossika?

[Kraut]

I've come across this summary of historical trends in language teaching
http://www.languageteachingideas.com/page5.htm

[AnthonyLauder]

She uses the term "out of date methods", but do methods have an expiry date? I think she means "unfashionable methods".

When I first got serious about language learning, I was careful to buy the latest courses, assuming they would included the latest ideas on the best way to teach and learn. Unfortunately, over the years I have found that these new courses were often the very worst resources I owned.

Perhaps it is because I am in my 50s, and therefore am old fashioned myself, but my favourite (and most effective) learning resources have proven to be older courses that (for the most part) are no longer in print and that I bought used from ebay. Linguaphone courses from the 1970s, Berlitz courses from the 1940s, the Living Language Ultimate series, and so on.