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Why Have Chapters or Lessons? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 9 of 16 07 October 2012 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
I like L-R, but even that has chapters. They're fundamentally a useful way to divide a book-sized amount of material. Introducing more and more complexity from sample sentences is done a bit in some material, and can be very useful. Still, I'd find a whole book arranged like that, without any other structure, rather daunting. Have you seen "Lingua Latina"? Barring that, "Gerda Malaperis" is online, but not quite as suitable for beginning from nothing. Lastly, as has been mentioned by a few posters, it feels nice to finish manageable chunks. Variations on this point are made by everyone from khatzumoto through academics looking to increase the gamification of education. Don't read any of this as a defence of the typical language textbook model. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pfn123 Senior Member Australia Joined 5082 days ago 171 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 16 08 October 2012 at 2:01am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree with you, a little often is best. Small chunks make learning smoother, funner, and more effective. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of commercially available programmatic courses (save the ones I already mentioned.) I suppose because it's different. People want the familiar. I guess this is why publishers advertise, to make their 'methods' household names (Pimsleur, Rosetta, etc.) But as I said before, we as students could make a DIY. Take a normal coursebook and 'MacGyver' up your own programmatic course. Assimil would be best for this. Instead of using it one lesson each day, just go through the numbered sentences at your own pace. Then, when you've worked through the course like this, go back and revise and do the exercises. The only thing lacking by doing this is that programmatic courses tend to have a revise-as-you-go sort of style. In one frame, you're taught 'Sir Edmund Barton was the first prime minister of Australia.' Then in a following frame, you're asked: 'Who was the first prime minister of Australia?' In lieu of traditional 'exercises', programmatic courses blend the different parts of a traditional course together, (making it more even and balanced, in my opinion.) You're required to apply the knowledge in the same way you learnt it. In terms of a DIY language course, you can do 'mini-revisions' perhaps. I suppose it comes down to whether it is more a method of teaching or of learning? It is both, I think, and so you could use a traditional textbook this way. But it would be better to have a specially designed course. P.S. Just a thought, but isn't this a little like how LingQ works? It's somewhere between full-blown programmatic lessons and Assimil lessons. Or maybe it's just me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pfn123 Senior Member Australia Joined 5082 days ago 171 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 16 08 October 2012 at 2:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was thinking about it, and realised you could use Anki (or other SRS) for this. If someone was willing to put in the work, Anki could be used not just to revise, but as a programmed course of instruction. One card would equal one frame of the programmatic course.
Just a thought. Edited for punctuation. Edited by pfn123 on 08 October 2012 at 2:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 16 08 October 2012 at 7:16am | IP Logged | |||||
Not Anki, but Brainscape does this. There's a downloadable deck called "Spanish sentence builder", which starts off with very simple sentences and gradually introduces new vocab and new grammar points, reinforcing them through spaced repetition along the way. I started doing it, but got bored, but I'm sure it's great for some types of people. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 16 08 October 2012 at 7:28am | IP Logged | |||||
I really love the structure of ChinesePod. It's nonlinear. Basically, there are 2685 lessons (at the moment), divided into a number of levels. You start at the "Newbie level" and pick lessons in that category which interest you. So if you like sports you might start with the sports-themed lessons. After a while the explanations of things you already know become tedious and you switch to the "Elementary level", and so on. You can gradually move up the scale at your own pace learning lessons with themes that interest you or that are relevant (so if you're going to the barber's tomorrow you can listen to the lesson "At the Barber's" at your appropriate level). The downside is of course that it takes a heckuvalot of material. ChinesePod has managed to do it by continually producing new material, making the service better and better the longer it keeps going. I think there's a lot of amazing ways modern technology could make great courses, but many of these ways require huge amounts of lesson material. I could for example imagine a program that continually tests you and recommends new material based on your strengths and weaknesses. So if you're having trouble with the subjunctive, the next few lessons will be more subjunctive-heavy, focusing on reviewing and strengthening what you've already learned. If your listening comprehension is good, future lessons will have faster-spoken audio, and so on. This would be pretty great, but it'd take a very large amount of lessons to make, since the average user will only encounter a fraction of the availible material. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 16 08 October 2012 at 11:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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Text books are divided into chunks that ought to be suitable for one lesson in a language course, and therefore each chapter should take just about the same time if you run through them in the specified order. At least that the way it should function in the best of all worlds. And as long as you follow a course with isolated lessons, all of the same length, this scheme may not not totally idiotic - but in my opinion the studyplan is.
On the other hand grammars are divided into logical chunks and these are hierarchically organized. Therefore the chapters and subchapters can be of different length, but the general level of detail should not differ too much - even though the author may have specialized in something special this should be too obvious in the book. Drills should be banned from anything called 'grammar'. Instead you can make a follow-up book with exercises ... and then we have the programmatical scheme where each 'chunk' should deal with one problem, and each chunk should be of a size which permits that it is dealt with in one go. Such a chunk can for instance deal with a certain verbal form or a pronoun. And it should be done not with one lonely and forlorn example, but with so many that you can see the pattern and start producing more of the same kind yourself. One big problem with classical textbooks is that their examples are made so different that there is no pattern to detect in any lesson. Maybe their authors are scared of being boring, but the result is that the exercises become empty puzzle solving. A 'chunk' can also deal with an idiomatic expression or a semantic field, for instance a certain type of machinery or the noble art of beer brewing. If I read a text about a paleontological museum in Greece I do expect some entertainment, but I also do it to learn the vocabulary of that field of knowledge. Personally I don't follow courses and therefore I may use texts from textbooks because they are the easiest you can find, but I wouldn't promise to respect the borders between the lessons in any book. If I want to know something about a construction I supplement the meager information in the textbook with a grammar, even if this means that I learn something which I wasn't supposed to know about yet according to the textbook author (which reminds me about a situation at the beginning of a 'Gymnasium' class in physics, where I gave an answer in a physics class and was told that it was wrong because we hadn't learnt about the relativity theory yet" - one fool identified, and it wasn't me!). The division into numbered lessons is the result of the way time is allotted in the schol system, and it has nothing to do with the way languages should be learned. Edited by Iversen on 08 October 2012 at 2:41pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 16 08 October 2012 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pfn123 Senior Member Australia Joined 5082 days ago 171 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 16 09 October 2012 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Good catch! I didn't think of it before, but Penton In Your Car series is like this. I have all three levels for Japanese. Each lesson is made up of sentences, all with translations. But each sentence introduces no more than one new item. I suppose with all these L2 sources people are pointing out, it's not so much what you use but how you use it. P.S. I think I heard Penton has gone to the wall. I'm not sure about this though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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