Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Apr 12, 2018 8:23 am

tarvos wrote:No, it's used for people who are illiterate.


Yes, that's the group of learners I had in mind.
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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?)
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby tommus » Thu Apr 12, 2018 12:32 pm

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?)

I think other material is far more comprehensive in terms of grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. than these 12 sessions. The Woord voor Woord was fairly limited in terms of number of unique words and sentences. So 12 short sessions is just the beginning. It wouldn't put you on the CEFR scale, even for listening. But I think it is a very firm foundation.

I think the key is that it approaches a natural way of learning. It is full immersion. It is intense in that it requires and captures your full attention. And I found it addictive. Now I don't know how I would feel after 100 sessions. But I was looking forward to her getting up from her desk (which she did a bit) and getting out into the world, to build on the first part, and to describe more complex situations. She could go to a restaurant, buy a bus ticket, ride a bicycle, shop in a store, go to the doctor, etc. all with full descriptive situations, objects and movement. I think it would continue to be addictive in that you would be fully comprehending the new language. You would be immersed, not using a second language such as English.

I have the Michael Thomas 4-CD Dutch, an Assimil Dutch, two or three Hugo Dutch, and a number of other Dutch courses and much material. But these courses, I found to not be exciting and I struggled to finish them. Their effectiveness level wasn't obvious as I worked through the courses, so I didn't get the same excitement as I did with Woord voor Woord. I suppose these things are very personal in terms of what works for each person. But I find it hard to imagine that most learners would not immediately see the value in a course similar to Woord voor Woord if it were available in their target language. And it is hard to say how well it would work beyond the introductory level. And of course, it is mainly targeting listening skills, but that is so very important to further progress.

One of the problems with language learning is that the learner reaches plateaus where it becomes difficult to perceive progress. I think with Woord voor Woord, you would see progress continuously. You would feel progress because you were experiencing new words, sentences, situations, etc. within an immersion environment where you were understanding everything. I guess the key is what everyone refers to as "comprehensible input". Well, this Woord voor Woord technique provides exactly that. I would modify that to "interesting comprehensible input". It would be a challenge to make large courses using the Woord voor Woord technique. But I think its effectiveness would be very impressive.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby Cainntear » Thu Apr 12, 2018 8:52 pm

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.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby smallwhite » Fri Apr 13, 2018 4:17 am

tommus wrote:And it is hard to say how well it would work beyond the introductory level.

1. Looks similar to ALG (automatic language growth) that was linked to from the thread Feedback for Study Plan Needed. The first link is a journal covering I think ~2000 hours of learning.

2. I've heard that at l'Alliance Francaise Hong Kong they teach in French from day 1 and don't use any Chinese or English. Many students complain about not understanding, not following and eventually not being able to continue with the classes.

3. How do you do revision? Do you watch the video again, or do you look at your notes that have English/L1 in them?

4. If the teacher says "I'm walking to the door" but stops walking mid-sentence because the door is so near, such that she ends up saying "I'm walking to the door" while she is mostly standing by the door, I'm not sure I will always understand the intended message. Dutch speakers can test the effectiveness of the gestures in this video by watching it muted.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby tommus » Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:42 am

smallwhite wrote:4. If the teacher says "I'm walking to the door" but stops walking mid-sentence because the door is so near, such that she ends up saying "I'm walking to the door" while she is mostly standing by the door, I'm not sure I will always understand the intended message.

Well, that is related to how well and how accurately the teacher carries out the actions and movements. If she says "I'm walking to the door" while actually walking, and says "I'm standing by the door" when she is standing by the door, articulating with her hands that she is indeed "by" the door, I expect alert students will fully understand. There is a part in Woord voor Woord where the instructor spends a lot of time and effort talking about being "behind", "in front of", "beside", "near", etc. the computer. Sure, there will always be the possibility of some misunderstanding. It is a matter of skill and attention to detail on the part of the instructor to make things as clear as possible. It is probably not much different than using translations in other languages which could also be misleading. But it sure is a huge improvement over talking heads. And it sure is a whole lot better than the language classes I had in high school, focusing on dull, boring vocabulary and dull, boring grammar by a non-native language teacher.

If you wanted, you could have subtitles in your native language to ensure that you had a better chance of fully understanding. But I think that would ruin the effectiveness of this technique.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby Cainntear » Sat Apr 14, 2018 7:51 am

tommus wrote:Well, that is related to how well and how accurately the teacher carries out the actions and movements. [...] It is a matter of skill and attention to detail on the part of the instructor to make things as clear as possible. It is probably not much different than using translations in other languages which could also be misleading. But it sure is a huge improvement over talking heads. And it sure is a whole lot better than the language classes I had in high school, focusing on dull, boring vocabulary and dull, boring grammar by a non-native language teacher.

You're comparing a good teacher with a bad one, and using that to praise the style of teaching. If I was to compare an accomplished university lecturer who teaches with mother-tongue explanations to a jaded jobbing teacher who teaches monolingually, the bilingual teaching is going to be better.

There are lots of variables that make this a very hard technique to apply when teaching to absolute beginners, so you have to be a very good teacher to do it well and avoid confusing and frustrating your students. If you do confuse them, you leave them with nothing they can work with, because they don't understand the material to be learned. By contrast, unless your teacher is utterly incompetent or drunk, you'll at least leave a bilingual classroom with something you can work with to teach yourself the language.

To be fair, as pure videos go, it is far better than average, because it does force you to think. Videos with explanations do tend to leave your brain with nothing to do, so you switch off. But nowadays there's little reason for using videos alone. Technology allows us to insert interactive quizzes into our videos, or insert short video clips into our quizzes. An online class can now mimic the classroom experience -- explanation, practice, explanation, practice, etc etc.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby tommus » Sat Apr 14, 2018 11:07 am

jeff_lindqvist wrote:some of us have experience of the original Michel Thomas 10 CD courses, and know that they manage to cover a lot.

I just dug out my Michel Thomas 4-CD course. The format is the teacher interacting with two students, one of which has quite poor Dutch pronunciation, and is struggling a bit to repeat all the sentences that the teacher is demanding of him. I found that technique to be quite annoying. I do not need to listen to that student struggling and using poor pronunciation. Perhaps the intent is to show the contrast between a learner's pronunciation and native pronunciation. After a half hour of that, I stopped. I was not getting a positive feeling. I was being distracted by the two students. I was not excited by the material. I was not getting addicted. Maybe the 10 CD course is better.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby Cainntear » Sat Apr 14, 2018 6:51 pm

tommus wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:some of us have experience of the original Michel Thomas 10 CD courses, and know that they manage to cover a lot.

I just dug out my Michel Thomas 4-CD course. The format is the teacher interacting with two students, one of which has quite poor Dutch pronunciation, and is struggling a bit to repeat all the sentences that the teacher is demanding of him. I found that technique to be quite annoying. I do not need to listen to that student struggling and using poor pronunciation. Perhaps the intent is to show the contrast between a learner's pronunciation and native pronunciation. After a half hour of that, I stopped. I was not getting a positive feeling. I was being distracted by the two students. I was not excited by the material. I was not getting addicted. Maybe the 10 CD course is better.

The intent was to make the whole thing feel like being in a lesson. In the original courses (the FIGS ones recorded by Thomas himself), I felt this worked quite well -- not so much in the courses recorded by other teachers after his death, though. Probably because the ones he recorded were literally a recording of his lessons, edited only for the breaks they had in the classes, whereas the ones after his death were heavily edited to remove student errors -- errors that were only there because the teaching wasn't good enough to start with.

The Dutch course was a particularly odd one. It was clearly scripted, and they'd basically translated the German course as closely to word-for-word as was possible. They also used students who had clearly studied German before, which I found really annoying.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby Speakeasy » Sat Apr 14, 2018 8:49 pm

Cainntear wrote: ... The Dutch course was a particularly odd one. It was clearly scripted, and they'd basically translated the German course as closely to word-for-word as was possible. They also used students who had clearly studied German before, which I found really annoying.
It is not my intention to derail the main topic of this very interesting discussion thread and I am not suggesting that we compare and contrast the vices and virtues of the Michel Thomas Method with the one that is already under discussion.

Cainntear has expressed his support of the MT Method numerous times in the LLORG and in the HTLAL whereas I have often expressed my near total dissatisfaction with it. Nevertheless, I found his comments on the Michel Thomas Dutch course very interesting, most particularly as it was the only MT course that I have found even remotely palatable! This suggests that there is something very specific about the original MT courses to which some people respond quite well, but which I simply cannot stand, whereas the reverse is true concerning those courses in which Michel had no personal involvement.

Please accept my sincerest apologies for this temporary departure from the main topic of discussion, I shan’t be bothering you any further.
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Re: Best example of Total Physical Response (TPR) language teaching

Postby tommus » Sat Apr 14, 2018 9:56 pm

Speakeasy wrote:Please accept my sincerest apologies for this temporary departure from the main topic of discussion

No apology necessary. Those were very interesting comments. I think they emphasise just how "individual" language learning can be. Styles and methods that some people love do not appeal to some other people at all. I think the word I used earlier is something we individually should be looking for. And that is addiction. If we find a language, a technique, a TV series, subject material, etc. that we find so interesting that we become addicted, then it no longer seems like hard work and almost guarantees that we are on our way to very effective learning.
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