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I Hate Michel Thomas | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 49 of 61 02 May 2010 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Even if Michel Thomas jumps around more than your course (and I don't really think it does), I'm telling you straight out that your course taxes my memory more than Thomas ever did. You have no way of gauging this, because you cannot study your course as though you weren't familiar with the contents. I am giving you feedback, and you are claiming the opposite without any evidence. You have written something on the assumption that you know better than a guy who had spent 50 years of his life teaching languages, and you are simply denying any feedback that suggests your initial assumptions were wrong. If you really want to improve your course, you have to take feedback and act on it, not ignore it!
This is not a question of self-discipline, but a question of competence. A beginner does not have the competence to know the limits of his own knowledge, so students cannot judge for themselves whether they know something or whether they're doing it right, because they do not know what it feels like to do it right -- they can only judge themselves by whether they can complete the tasks presented or not. And if they can't, they can't judge for themselves why not. So we have to lead them through the learning process. The philosophy of "don't let the student make a mistake" has been ridiculed by association with weak behaviorism -- the idea that saying it right every time forms a habit has been proven wrong in various studies, and that's not what Thomas does, because the audiolingual approaches tended to ignore working on choice. Learning language is about learning to choose the right word or structure, and audiolingual courses prevent mistakes by not presenting the student the opportunity to choose, so the student never learns to choose. The reason Thomas appears to "jump around" is that in order for the student to have the opportunity to practise choosing the appropriate language, there has to be a variety of language to chose from. Thomas constrains the choice, but expands it progressively, keeping it to a level that matches the students' growing ability and confidence. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6537 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 50 of 61 02 May 2010 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The evidence I hinted was towards the amount of vocab. If my memory serves, my vocab is based on cognates(so is
most of the vocab in MT), so one certainly couldn't be scrolling up to find the correct word; and of these cognates, I've covered less than half of the vocab MT covered in CD1. So the course somehow taxes your memory more than MT; this means that the experiment didn't work. I already know this, and if I was denying feedback, then I guess that's my bad. The distinction between competence and self-dicipline is odd to say the least. In the words of some of my most influential professors, "Do your F*****ing readings and homework!" I don't mean to sound uncouth, but holding the hand of the student is ridiculous. Edited by Kugel on 02 May 2010 at 10:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5452 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 51 of 61 02 May 2010 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I did read your entire post. It was not my intention to make you sound like a spoilt child. You wrote (among other things): This, by the way, is not only MT's problem. Even with Linguaphone AllTalk, which I'm happily using right now, they explain at length Spanish peculiarities that are exactly the same in Italian, so I have to patiently wait for them to sort out why libreria means bookshop and to say library you have to say biblioteca. OK, I am patient, I understand that English-speaking people are the rulers of the world so everything is geared to them. But in the case of the MT students, because of the format, this aspect has the chance to be much more annoying and boring. As you say, all of these courses are geared toward English speakers. I haven't tried MT myself, but if you search the forum, you'll find that a lot of English speakers also find MT annoying because of the students and the mistakes they make. If it's annoying for English speakers, it's no wonder it's also annoying for the rest of us. Edited by tractor on 03 May 2010 at 4:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 52 of 61 03 May 2010 at 12:00am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not talking about hand-holding, I'm talking about teaching. If we could all just learn from reading a book, we would only need teachers long enough to learn how to read and we could all leave school at 9 years old. The distinction between competence and self-discipline is not "odd" -- it's well-documented and easy to demonstrate. Picture a language class you've been in, whether as teacher or student. The teacher says a word in the target language and asks a student to repeat it. the student attempts to say it. "No, no, no. Not like that," says the teacher and then says the word again. And the student's response? "That's what I said!" The student's lack of competence makes him unable to recognise the difference between what he said and what the teacher said. No amount of "self-discipline" or "hard work" will make up for the fact that the student is incapable of hearing that difference. The teacher who responds by simply repeating the word over and over again is effectively using the student of being stupid while failing to actually teach what the student needs to know. I think we've probably all experienced that on several occasions, and many of us will have been the student ourselves. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5592 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 53 of 61 03 May 2010 at 12:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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this thread is like dragons den now hahaha
I'm out 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| stout Senior Member Ireland Joined 5370 days ago 108 posts - 140 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 54 of 61 04 May 2010 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I cannot stand the MT French course.The gruff voice of MT irritates me to no end.
As for the 2 students on the MT French course.The Englishman is not too bad.He has at least some idea of what he's learning. However the American lady is pure annoying,pure idiotic,she clearly dose'nt have a clue in how to learn French and I sense that even MT was not too pleased with her. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6537 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 55 of 61 05 May 2010 at 1:35am | IP Logged | |||||
I can understand needing a good teacher to discern differences in complicated phonologies like Hindi Vietnamese. Tutors are always good. The tasks at hand, the ones involving basic grammar, do indeed require native speakers/qualified teachers. But if language program follows the outline of prompt/answer routine, then all that's needed are checks for accuracy, which by the way I would really welcome. What's needed for this discussion, I think, is defining the mission of MT or any language program for that matter. I don't mean a vague mission of how it's good to learn languages; I want to avoid hype that's commonly associated with language learning. Instead, I mean going into detail about what areas of the language are covered, going down to the details. If the language program fulfills its mission, then it's a success. But we can't review language programs by independently defining its mission. A language program for the self-learner, no matter how good, can't replace a teacher when it comes to practicing phonetics. But this wasn't the mission of the language program to begin with. So as for pronunciation in regards to MT, one can't say that the program is bad because of mispronunciation; MT's mission wasn't about mastering the phonetics of x language. Using this reasoning, one can't say that an online course, even one that's a carbon copy of MT(it would be quite easy to move his course to a webpage and I'm amazed that Hodder and Stoughton is avoiding this), is bad by saying that it doesn't force the student to pronounce the answers. Edited by Kugel on 05 May 2010 at 2:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5592 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 56 of 61 05 May 2010 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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One of the reasons I think the MT courses are audio based is to avoid newcomers to language x anglicising
the pronounciation of foreign words. This would be a danger if a course was on a webpage. Secondly, as it's a business, the hype would fall away if a course that claims to use no pen or paper, no writing down etc indeed included these aspects. MT's primary market I believe are complete beginners and either himself of the marketing monkeys were quick to realise that most people coming from a background of high school french where they were possibily drilled to death and made endless vocab lists would jump at the to learn a language simply be listening and answering verbally. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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