tommus wrote:It is becoming obvious that I should not have put TPR in the title of this thread. That part is derailing discussion on how effective the technique is that this Dutch instructor is using. Maybe there is a good name for this technique.
It is what basically
every teacher who teaches in target-language-only does with an absolute beginner.
So what are the opinions and possibly evidence of the effectiveness of this very descriptive teaching technique?
It works well enough, and it's really the only option in a monolingual classroom. However, it has never proven all that effective, and there are people who think the only reason this style of teaching didn't go out of fashion was the TEFL industry -- you simply can't find enough native speakers fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or whatever to fill the demand for "native teachers" in a bilingual classroom. TEFL is the highest profile language teaching, and it has naturally become dominant enough that it is affecting people's attitudes to teaching at all. Also, outside of English teaching, a fair chunk of all language teaching is lessons for immigrants, which takes place in classrooms with mixed mother tongues -- again, this style of teaching is the only option.
Is it likely to be effective only at beginner levels? It seems to me that it would work at any level, to introduce new vocabulary, or even to emphasise and explain grammar.
It seems that it could be used online and in apps, Skype chats, etc., by using photos and images when it isn't practical to use real objects, movements, etc.
The effectiveness decreases the further you move from face-to-face classes, as the learner is less and less involved, and the language gets more and more constrained and artificial.
For a start, you're hit with the choice between forcing students to answer in sentences or letting students answer with one-word answers. Neither is a good option. Answer-in-sentences is unnatural because it means excessive repetition of words from the question ("what is your name?" "My name is Cainntear" -- repetition of name, is; half-repetition of your->my) or we allow them to answer in a natural way ("what is your name?" "Cainntear.") and then we're act surprised when they fail to learn any grammar.
Lots of apps have tried to do similar things, but that's how we ended up with Rosetta Stone...!
One of the things about any classroom or real world setting is that there are plenty of things that are simply part of the environment and the social setting that can be exploited to aid comprehensibility. Woord vor woord does this:
1) it's a social situation, so there's greetings.
2) there's a new person, so we expect introductions; also, it's a language class, and we expect "my name is"
3) in the classroom, we're primed to think about teachers and students, hence docent and cursist... (but I'm not convinced it works well on video, and I suspect that total newbies would be flummoxed by it)
4) when you're in a room, the door is an incidental but necessary feature. It's a part of our mental model of the room. In the classroom, "I'm walking to the door" is incidental. In the video we have a classroom, so it's again incidental. But as soon as we are in an app, we don't have a mental model of being in a room, and the "walking to the door" becomes a single deliberate act, and not part of our mental model. Many of the things a teacher could pick up around a classroom are accepted as incidental, and seen and processed subconsciously long before the event, but do this in an app and everything that is presented as new vocabulary is present as a "thing" that the learner gives conscious attention to.
Attempts to mimic a classroom in an app are never going to work, because the student's internal experience is totally different.
tommus wrote:One huge advantage of Woord voor Woord is that it does not rely on English or any other language. It is stand-alone. You become immersed in the language you are learning.
Do you? Or do you simply actively process it? I know when I'm in this sort of setting as a student, I'm consciously or half-consciously deconstructing everything I hear. The one time I tried not to do that was in a demonstration lesson of Finnish given to us during my CELTA training. I wanted to try to do it "properly" to understand the process a student went through. But after the lesson, we were asked lots of questions about what we noticed, and the guys who picked it up easiest were the ones who were actively thinking about things like gender (noticing that Finnish didn't seem to have them) and conjugations. The ones who couldn't consciously describe the language the least struggled the most during the lesson.
I find these talking heads get very boring very quickly.
So do I. But then I think video is the wrong medium for language learning, because it is not interactive. I'm not a huge fan of Duolingo (there's an awful lot it does wrong) but at the very least I'm forced to get actively involved in the language.
I found Woord voor Woord was addictive even though I already knew most of the Dutch. I think it would be especially addictive in a new language because you would immediately get the feeling that you were learning quickly and easily, and you were not at all depending on seeing translations in English or your native language. Again, I think the technique is addictive, which is hugely important, and quite a contrast to boring, which I find far too many courses to be.
I personally find the technique to be demotivating, because I get confused and frustrated. I understand this is a personal thing, as I find it difficult to accept uncertainty. However, I've also seen enough learners struggling to maintain attention to things that are ambiguous to know that I'm not really in a minority on this. In fact, there's a lot in the literature that indicates the brain resists learning things until the meaning is clear, which is something a good mother-tongue description can achieve in a much shorter space of time.
Now, I'm going to requote one sentence:
I found Woord voor Woord was addictive even though I already knew most of the Dutch.
That suggests to me that it is very much above the level of an absolute beginner, because if it was something a beginner could process, surely you'd be
excrutiatingly bored...?
At the very least, how can you know it's any good if you didn't learn much Dutch from it?
jeff_lindqvist wrote:Tommus, could you compare this some other material in terms of grammar, sentence structure, level (on a CEFR scale)...? Is the video course "complete", or is there more material out there? What level would you say is attained after an hour and a half? (For comparison, some of us have experience of the original Michel Thomas 10 CD courses, and know that they manage to cover a lot. I don't know what it is in terms of CEFR, maybe Cainntear has an idea?)
Michel Thomas is completely orthogonal to the CEFR -- the CEFR is all about situations and stuff, and makes no reference to grammatical concepts. You can infer a link between ideas of "advanced" and "academic" use and certain constructions not used much colloquially, but that's about it. I'm not really a fan of the CEFR.