What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

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zenmonkey
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Apr 13, 2022 5:47 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:The German FSI course was useful but actually led me down the wrong path and I know a lot of truly useless phrases because literally, nobody says "gnädige Frau" except on stage. Having said that, it is one of the first resources I look for when working on a new language. I wish they had one for Farsi (not colloquial Dari).


- Gnädige Frau, ich möchte mich nochmal für den netten Abend bedanken. :)

(FSI German: Too old?)


:lol: Ha, look at least, I'm consistent in my love/hate of German FSI.
My daughters still laugh if I just lean over and say 'Botschaft' 'Streichhölzer' 'Flughafen' .... page 11, unit 1
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Le Baron
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby Le Baron » Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:53 pm

We had a language lab at school with audio-lingual methods and tape machines controlled by a tutor, but I didn't like them. It was like being trapped on a merry-go-round where you couldn't get off. I was glad when more class-based interaction was used; a mixture of direct method and explanation. With listen and repeat it's not necessarily that the format is bad (so long as it isn't the sole content of a course), but that ultimately it's too rigid in terms of engagement. I'm not against the principle, it being founded on sound principles of behaviourism, but it's only part of the story. Along the way you need to find your own groove when learning a language, this is the only way you can creatively 'take ownership' of the material as it were. Make it your own.
You don't just need random force-feeding or mass-feeding of ready-made 'correct' sentences, but you really do need large-scale vocabulary exposure. And to be TESTED on your own terms for exactly what you've been learning in small blocks. To test yourself and to be tested by others, quite a lot. Not just call and response for reaction, which is partially necessary, but also for creative recall. If anything should be drilled it is vocabulary, probably more than fixed sentences beyond the very common fixed structures.

Ideally I would promote a mixture of some audio-lingual with a less structured input system and also testing yourself by speaking/writing short passages and interaction. Drilling is good for reflexes, but perhaps less so for creative sentence building.

I've looked around at the apps and online courses which now dominate language teaching and find them wanting. Many are not even attempting to do anything new in the way old systems were designed around research. Any half-decent old book can teach you the grammar they offer and even then a lot barely go past A2-B1. So they're weak on grammar, weak on input/content which is drip-fed very slowly and don't offer any drilling of anything. They seem to be an expensive con. I'm sceptical about whether people really learn languages from these apps.
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RyanSmallwood
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby RyanSmallwood » Fri Apr 15, 2022 3:55 pm

I think I've mentioned this in some other threads, but I'll mention again that even though a drill-focused approach is out of fashion these are very adaptable to input based styles of learning using something like the truncate silence feature in audacity. For distant languages especially I find using these materials greatly accelerates working through the beginner phase. One of the especially useful features of the FSI and DLI materials is they're spoken at natural speed from the beginning and use repetition and phonology drills to aid listening rather than artificially slowed down dialogs, which imo is much better prep for listening down the road.

The datedness will obviously be a tradeoff for some, I don't think its such a huge drawback if its used more as a way to boost comprehension. For me personally since I'm interested in older kinds of media like movies, radio, television, books, etc. the older quality of the recordings and vocabulary is actually good practice.
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