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Reducing Self-Study Method Abandonment | ||
Tags: Burn-out | Self-Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 139 28 August 2013 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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The real promise of the new technologies and platforms is interactivity. The biggest problem of self-teaching methods is not that people give up; it's that the methods are linear and non-interactive. In other words, they are boring or, rather, people get bored quickly.
Most people learn a language to interact with other people. This will be the hallmark of the new methods. A lot of Internet-based methods are really in their initial stages but at least the technology is available: tablets or smartphones, ubiquitous wi-fi and inexpensive telecommunications. Although many people are skeptical, I believe the self-study language methods will all migrate to the tablet and mobile platform in the relatively near future (10 -15 years). I am sure that as we speak Assimil must be planning for the day when they will stop printing the books and distribute everything digitally. There are all kinds of advantages to printed books for the end-user, but the real advantages of the digital platform are for the publisher. No printing, no storage, no shipping, instant updating, nothing to get damaged or lost and, above all, higher profits. Plus, think of all the multimedia possibilities. In my opinion, this is a no-brainer. Certain kinds of language books, probably at the very low end, might be around for a while, but all those boxes with CDs and printed manuals will be soon gone. Who remembers printed encyclopedias? Dictionaries are next. And so forth. As for language changes that various people have mentioned, this is particularly true for the written language where spellings do change. Books and methods have to change of course. But if you look at the spoken language of English, French and Spanish, the grammar has hardly changed in a hundred years. The verb conjugations have not changed one bit. Neither the pronouns, the number and gender agreement system, etc. What has changed quite a bit of course is the vocabulary. But all native speakers can perfectly understand a movie made in the 1930s. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 50 of 139 28 August 2013 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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You are confusing interaction with other people with interactive methods of teaching. Those are two different things. Most of those apps, websites etc proud of calling themselves "interactive" have nothing in common with interaction between real people.
I don't know how old you are but were you ever exposed to the modern interactive methods at school? They come from the same theories. It's not people giving up or lazy, it's just the boring methods etc. The result are schools with lots of computers, interactive white boards, tons of group projects instead of traditional teaching methods and so on. It looks nice at first sight but the real consequences are thousands of hours of wasted time, much worse skills and knowledge and much dumber people leaving the schools. It is a no brainer. Of course publishers will try to go the digital path, especially as they can easily rip people off due to digital fences, copyrights, laws restricting reselling ebooks etc (for some examples, look at emks log, to open rights website or site of any pirate party). The question is whether people are already the herd of sheep that will allow them and buy this or whether the market will force the companies to do this in a civilized way for the benefit of everyone included. Well, of course it is possible most good quality courses will be soon gone and so will many other things. Have you read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451? This is where we are headed if the market allowes everything to go super interactive and dumbed down. And when a learner gives up on a good quality method (especially when they give up on learning completely), it is usually mistake of the learner. I think our civilization should return to some basic, logical, no-brainer principles. Such as that learning, especially self-study, is primarily responsibility of the learner. By dumbing our civilization down to flatter the stupid and lazy ones, we are heading to hell. But those worse quality learners (because that is often the real trouble, not the method) will give up no matter what method you choose. Self-study book, classes, tutors, duolingo, babbel, memrise, everything. Because every shiny "interactive" toy will become boring. The only thing that can make it interesting is content but that is often not the priority for the modern publishers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4372 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 51 of 139 28 August 2013 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can't really comment on what I used for German, because by the time I started self-studying, I really didn't use any textbooks, I just used Deutsche Welle podcasts and materials.
For my Polish methods, I haven't fully given up on both of them, but I can say why I've reduced my time using them. I've used Hurra po polsku (during my class) and First Year Polish on my own. Hurra I thought didn't give enough grammar explanations (or really, any grammar explanations), had this constant obsession of reading passages about going to the dentist, and had so many choices of bright colors on each page that it was really hard to follow. The result: I use it for audio and for exercises--it does have a lot of exercises with the answer key. With First Year Polish, the grammar is explained really well--perhaps a little too much for a beginner, although I don't necessarily disagree that everything introduced should at least be recognized in order to have basic command of the language; Polish really doesn't have much native material ranging from fairly "easy" to very challenging (compared with German with sources ranging from Deutsche Welle to die Zeit, which are very opposite in terms of difficulty). There are a lot of exercises, but no answer key, because it wasn't designed as a self-study method, and it functionally has no audio--you can get the dreaded aiff files but that can be quite a hassle to even get them to load. The result: I'm on chapter 25 of 30 and it's been a very slow process. I did happen to look just now and see that I'm technically past the intended "first year" part, so maybe everything now didn't really need to be included in it. It seems I found two extremes between one method with no grammar and one with so much grammar that it almost felt overwhelming. I don't know how I would really "improve" First Year Polish, because the grammar does need to be learned eventually, and as I said, I think it was pretty "fair" to include that much in the first edition. The real problem was the lack of audio/answer key, which makes it difficult as a self-study tool. I know there's a new edition now, so maybe some of that has changed. For Hurra I think I just had a problem with trying to learn such a grammar heavy language through purely communicative methods--and the topics in the book weren't interesting enough to hold my attention. Personally, I would combine the levels together (so that I would always have a definite reference point if I needed to remember a specific grammar issue). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6912 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 52 of 139 28 August 2013 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
This one? Exactly-parallel audiobooks/books 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5384 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 53 of 139 29 August 2013 at 2:11am | IP Logged | ||
I agree -- the risk of creating a course that people will give up because it's too easy is very low. On the other hand, people often give up because it's too hard, too much work or too boring. Now these are worth watching for. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 54 of 139 29 August 2013 at 2:29am | IP Logged | ||
Yes. That's it! Thanks for finding it. That was a decent start but we need lots more reports of good audiobook/book pairs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 55 of 139 29 August 2013 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't really know who is confused about the meaning of interactivity and I'm not really interested in what interactivity meant in classroom teaching. The interactivity I'm talking about in the new generation of online self-teaching methods will be some combination of machine and human mediated communication with the user.
The opposite of this is what we have now when we use a book or listen to tapes and try to pronounce to the best of our ability. Obviously, there is no feedback. A rather useless step up is those systems that allow you to record your voice and display a wave form that you try to match with good model. But still there is no individualized feedback. Some systems will try to individualize some of the exercises depending on how well or poorly you do on some tests. What is sorely missing is oral feedback that is specific to you. This is a tall order of course but should become possible. And of course, the ultimate step is to have a real human with whom you can converse. That already exists but is quite expensive. What we need is the systems that can automate some of these interactive functions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5384 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 56 of 139 29 August 2013 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Sure, entirely interactive online tools would be awesome, but if this were the only type of tool we aimed to
produce, the vast majority of books we have all been using -- including the ones we most loved -- simply wouldn't exist. The tools you call "the future" cost a lot of money to produce and require important investments that most authors can't afford. For most languages, this would mean no material at all. So I'm not sure it's going to be the future any time soon, except for the major languages where investing several thousands of dollars makes sense from a business standpoint. And if the future of language learning depends on corporations and business investments, then we're all doomed. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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