What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

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What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby sfuqua » Fri Aug 13, 2021 5:14 pm

Ages ago, on another forum, this community used to be full of people doing FSI, DLI, Pimsleur and other courses.

Way back in the last century, when I was first being trained as a language teacher, I was trained to teach languages using the audiolingual "method". I found it very useful. As a teacher, it was easy to make decisions about what to do next. I found the method effective.

I think people on the old forum who could stand them found the old FSI and DLI courses useful. I know I did. Many people hated them with a passion, but they did produce results.

As a teacher, I know that education is full of fads, and language teaching is no different. There was a fad that went through the field that asserted that Chomsky had somehow proven that the audiolingual method didn't work, and the whole field of audiolingual teaching went out of favor. I think this is a shame.

Does anybody still use audiolingual courses? Does anybody agree with me that they have a place in language learning?

Some recent courses could fit right in to an audiolingual model, Glossika sounds like them with its emphasis on "reps". Pimsleur has always been audiolingual. The whole "chorusing" approach and "shadowing" sound like they are taking much the same approach, drilling until the language becomes automatic.

Any thoughts? I just haven't heard much about this approach for a while, although I do see it mentioned in a few recent posts...
Last edited by sfuqua on Fri Aug 13, 2021 8:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby iguanamon » Fri Aug 13, 2021 5:32 pm

Pimsleur is an audio course, not an example of the audio-lingual method.

The method fell out of favor because, well, people don't like to do drills... regardless of their effectiveness.
Wikipedia wrote:In the late 1950s, the theoretical underpinnings of the method were questioned by linguists such as Noam Chomsky, who pointed out the limitations of structural linguistics. The relevance of behaviorist psychology to language learning was also questioned, most famously by Chomsky's review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1959. The audio-lingual method was thus deprived of its scientific credibility and it was only a matter of time before the effectiveness of the method itself was questioned.
In 1964, Wilga Rivers released a critique of the method in her book, The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher. Subsequent research by others, inspired by her book, produced results which showed explicit grammatical instruction in the mother language to be more productive.[citation needed] These developments, coupled with the emergence of humanist pedagogy led to a rapid decline in the popularity of audiolingualism.
Philip Smith's study from 1965-1969, termed the Pennsylvania Project, provided significant proof that audio-lingual methods were less effective than a more traditional cognitive approach involving the learner's first language.

I have done 2 DLI Basic Courses- Portuguese and Haitian Creole. I consider them to be the best, most thorough and multi-skill courses I have ever done in any language. The DLI Basic Courses have pattern drills; drills emphasizing vocabulary and grammar in the dialogs; dialogs with one-side of a conversation allowing the learner to take the part of both speakers after the other; a reading; comprehension questions that encourage writing; minimal English.

There's no "humor per se, but the courses are quite thorough and in depth. Whenever I suggest using them people are quick to respond that they're not appropriate for a beginner. Many people find them to be "dry" and "boring". I find them to be very effective. YMMV
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby luke » Fri Aug 13, 2021 6:11 pm

sfuqua wrote:Does anybody still use audiolingual courses? Does anybody agree with me that they have a place in language learning?

You know I've used FSI Spanish and French courses. I think they're good. Could the audio be better? Yes. Is a multi-track approach with them smart? Sure.

For the hobbyist or autodidact, a complete course like FSI is helpful. There are alternatives, but having something you can start and continue with through the whole learning phase is helpful.

I liked what you said the other day about backing off of FSI or "doing it at your own pace", rather than "trying to keep a pace". That's not exactly how you put it, but using FSI as a life raft on the journey is not a bad idea.

Which reminds me of the FSI paper Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice...
https://howlearnspanish.com/wp-content/ ... 999_07.pdf

The paper doesn't use the phrase, "there is no silver bullet" - from "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks - it does mention drills and audio-lingualism as a necessary component for many students.

These last few years, the explosion of foreign language content on the internet is changing the game. So much to choose from. It's easier to follow an input-mostly path than it was 20 years ago.

You also mentioned in a post about your 2 button Anki. I read about that yesterday on a Refold page. Are you following them as well?
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby sfuqua » Fri Aug 13, 2021 6:14 pm

I've always questioned the studies that showed the audiolingual method to be less effective. It is extremely difficult to do a true scientific study that applies to all learners in all situaltions. I spent years trying to do this at one point in my career. My most robust result was to prove that teaching vocabulary before students read a passage helps them comprehend it. Duh! That result was in the strange early days of Krashen, when explicit instruction was questioned, no matter what it was.
Michael Long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Long_(linguist) (one of my heroes and a personal friend, he passed away recently) once challenged us to name what "method" an excellent teacher was using. It was hard watching them. They used a bunch of techniques. They said they were audio lingual, but they explained things. Students did vocabulary meaning drills before sentence drills.
It is amusing that somebody found that explicit grammatical instruction was more effective than audio lingual instruction. A couple of years later, people were claiming that explicit grammatical instruction could not have any effect because of the wonderful Krashn Monitor Theory. Nonsense of course in its absolute form.
I guess I find that drills can be effective, at least at some points in language learning. I always thought that the claim by some instructors that teaching meaning was not a part of the audiolingual method, I always thought that this claim was nonsense too.

I guess I wish that language programs had more drills. I recently found a book by Mary Savelli https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WRN34XK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 to be a refreshing change from the other Old English books commonly used. None of it is audio, but she has drills! Transformation drills, and substituion drills.

I wish it was in audio.

By the way, I think I might have been in the room when Mike first contrasted the difference between a course which focuses on forms (probably grammatical syllabus) to one that focuses on form (get it right while communicating). What a great, challenging professor. I was proud to be what Mike called a "rude, argumentative graduate student". Knowing Mike, it was the best compliment he could have given me.
Last edited by sfuqua on Fri Aug 13, 2021 6:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby sfuqua » Fri Aug 13, 2021 6:18 pm

Right now I'm having some technical difficulties following the Refold forum. Their advice seems fine to me. There is so much more input available today; you are right.
I still love my FSI courses...
I think that my French suffers from a severe case too much input and not enough grammar. Maybe i need some FSI or something. :D
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby einzelne » Fri Aug 13, 2021 6:33 pm

FSI, DLI courses were made for highly motivated people who aimed to reach a high level of proficiency.
The majority of contemporary courses are targeted at laymen and marketed accordingly.
I can't tell it for the English speaking world, but when it comes to Russian textbooks and courses, if I want something akin to FSI and DLI, usually I have to download some Soviet books. Yes, the vocabulary would be outdated, but when it comes to drills, nothing can beat these old school huge volumes with tons of drills.
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby jeffers » Fri Aug 13, 2021 7:24 pm

sfuqua wrote:I think that my French suffers from a severe case too much input and not enough grammar. Maybe i need some FSI or something. :D


I'd been feeling that exact thing for quite a while, and am now on a review phase of French grammar with a few resources. I do feel that formal study of grammar and vocabulary is complimentary with a lot of input, and neither should be done without the other indefinitely. So I've currently dusted off my old mp3 files of FSI Basic French, and to be honest I forgot how well-designed the course is! Back when I was first working on FSI years ago, I was trying to get through the course, in the belief that completion was the goal, and finishing the course will do its magic. Now I'm taking the approach of "doing it at your own pace", rather than "trying to keep a pace" as Luke wrote.

However, my bigger issue with French grammar has always been the spelling of verb forms which sound ths same but are spelled differently. Unfortunately, audio-lingual courses aren't much help here if used orally alone. So I have also been making use of one other very traditional method, dictations, using the Orthodidact website: https://dictee.orthodidacte.com/Index.html. Another useful tool for working on my verb forms with spelling has been linguno.com.
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby sirgregory » Tue Apr 12, 2022 11:05 pm

I imagine it takes a lot of effort and resources to make a quality audio course in this style and that might be part of the story. Notably, FSI and DLI were developed by the US government to fill a practical need and therefore the materials were not produced with the same constraints as a commercial publisher. Most language tapes (especially the least expensive ones) have tended to be very simple. For example, it might give you a phrase in English followed by the target language equivalent with some space for you to answer and repeat. It's also common to simply include recordings of the dialogues in the course book.

Pimsleur, which as was noted isn't technically audio-lingual (as described on the Wikipedia article), could still be classified more broadly as a formatted audio program. That is, it's more than straight recordings of phrases and dialogues and demands more of you than simply repeating back phrases. (You could put Michel Thomas in this broader class as well). In that respect, it's similar to FSI. But I think it's no coincidence that Pimsleur is (or at least was) notoriously expensive. Nor is it a coincidence that Pimsleur is an audio course rather than being mainly a book course with a tacked on audio component.

Some Berlitz materials are in the audio-lingual style. The Self Teacher series (book only) is very similar to the Wikipedia description. "Ist das die Lampe?" "Nein, das ist nicht die Lampe, das ist der Tisch." But it would be much better as an audio course. I think Berlitz did have some other formatted audio programs like the "Think and Talk" series but those seem to be out of print and don't get talked about much.

Nowadays there is a glut of free native audio online, albeit mostly unstructured. This presumably lessens the relative value of an audio course, and certainly reduces people's willingness to pay for expensive audio courses. The recent investment in the language learning space seems to have gone toward developing "apps." Duolingo has had several equity rounds and has raised tens of millions of dollars each time. But venture capitalists aren't going to give you that kind of money to do old school audio drills that only a tiny minority of language hobbyists will be interested in. Possibly materials could be designed and recorded by volunteers as a labor of love but it would be a major project.

FSI/DLI materials still seem to be fairly popular with serious language learners, and even those who dislike the approach due to personal preference seem to acknowledge their quality and thoroughness. But there are a lot of options out there and many people will end up using other things for a variety of reasons. Sound quality, convenience, etc. I myself dabbled with the FSI German course. And while I admired it in many ways I think I was ultimately deterred by the sheer length of the manual.

Some subset of people seem to make much better progress with formatted audio programs than just about anything else. I think the founder of HTLAL had a strong preference in this direction. He really liked Pimsleur and FSI and disliked Assimil (I assume because it was too passive for him). Meanwhile Arguelles was a big Assimil guy who liked to shadow the target language text without interruptions and found the Assimil audio to be the best for this. It seems just about everyone agreed that audio heavy courses were the way to get results. Now probably all of the classic audio courses are losing market share to apps and unstructured online content.
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Apr 13, 2022 3:07 pm

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).
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Re: What ever happened to the audio lingual courses?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Apr 13, 2022 5:03 pm

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).


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