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Audio-lingual English? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7169 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 9 of 10 13 September 2008 at 7:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
These kids have done 5+ years of English in high school, & 1 in uni. & they still mix up he & she & talk about the past in the present tense. I've watched some video with them & they naturally parrot the dialog. So I think if dialogs were going to work, they'd done it by now!
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 10 13 September 2008 at 8:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How so? If you consider the number of successes independently of the number of failures, I'd say that's less empirical. I've never gone back to the prime sources, but here is one of the best overviews you'll find of the development of language teaching methodologies: http://webh01.ua.ac.be/didascalia/mortality.htm Audio-lingualism is one of the few methodologies that has been subject to proper study of large numbers of learners, and the numbers say that it's not particularly effective. Pointing out individuals who succeed does nothing to change the fact that a awful lot of people fail. It works for you: great - use it to teach yourself languages. But it doesn't work for all that many people, so should we really impose it on others. Furthermore (as I'm always at pains to say) the fact that you succeeded while doing it does not even mean it's optimal for you. It may be that you're doing something unconsciously which changes the nature of the task to something more useful. Furthermore (as you brought it up) connectionism further informs the argument against AL drills. Connectionism sees the brain as highly connected (self-evidently) and highlights the importance of multi-dimensioned relationships between items and contexts. Drills that attempt to teach distinctions by contrast may have exactly the opposite effect -- by placing the items in close spatial (or a page) and/or temporal proximity, the two items (eg he and she) become interconnected, and both gain activation when the learner seeks to use one. This means that the wrong one and the right one both jump out, and the wrong one can often win.
Agreed -- except for this word "audio-lingual". I'd say "fail to provide enough [spoken] language" (spoken in brackets because I believe spoken language is the only true language). Anyway, if you really want to build up drills, may I suggest you start a project on one the TEFL forums? If you get a couple of dozen like-minded people to work together, you can look out podcasts and the like under Creative Commons licenses and make a bank of sentences that would quickly coalesce into a drill pack. (I'm not suggesting this wouldn't be welcome here, just that you're more likely to get volunteers at ESLBase, ESLCafe or the like.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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