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Designing a language course | ||
Tags: Language Program | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 16 08 October 2011 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||
"Doing it skillfully" and "drilling it" are very different things. If you perform the same transformation (eg taking singular sentences and making them plural -- he likes it -> they like it etc) you are doing it mindlessly, and that's what the word "drilling" really means to most people. Drilling fails because it skips the most difficult part of sentence formulation: spontaneous recall of target language structures. The most spontaneous recall you get of a single structure in a drill is one time, regardless of how many questions or prompts there are in the drill. In most cases, though, you get no practice of recall whatsoever as the target structure is so commonly presented in the task description and/or an example task. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5771 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 16 08 October 2011 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cainntear, I only did the first units of FSI Korean, but their drills impressed me in one point: They would let you replace one word in the sentence for a couple of times, and then suddenly give you a word that had to replace another word in the sentence, so you had to understand the way the grammar worked, you had to know the meaning of the sentence as well as the meaning (or at least category) of the word to answer correctly. And suddenly, a transformation drill can become a formidable exercise, at least if you don't memorize the entire drill but allow yourself to make mistakes, understand those mistakes and learn from them.
My own concern with H.Computatralis' post is a different one, namely that when you're learning an instrument or a sport, you first have to practice motion patterns alien to you. But once you have a good foundation, acquiring new skills on the same instrument or in the same sport become easier because you can rely on your experience. Language learning on the other hand is neither mainly factual learning nor mainly procedural learning, it's both. So I personally believe that efficient learning has to go through cycles of factual and procedural learning for every grammar point. Some may find one order more effective than the other. I find it most effective to see examples so that I can try and figure out how it works, and afterwards get an explanation and exercises, correction, maybe a better explanation, and more exercises. For me it doesn't matter too much how the exercises look like, important is that I try to work out the rules by myself first. What I'd like to see in a language course are meta-learning strategies from the very start. My new English textbook does include some, but it is designed for a readership supposed to be at level B1. Edited by Bao on 08 October 2011 at 5:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4875 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 11 of 16 08 October 2011 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm doing a Latin course for the school I work for (late elementary-age students in a one-day-a-week homeschool co-op). It is enormous work for too little compensation. Well, I do get to refer to the good-looking author on occasion. I'd like to release it commercially, but I doubt I'll make more than a few hundred dollars a year, unless I sink some major effort into promotion. But I digress. The advice I'd have for anyone creating a language course is to have a broad knowledge of what is already available in a given language for your target audience. Have a definite pedagogical axe to grind. Know your audience. Know your audience. Know your audience. Failure to do those will get you a retread of something already out there. Or worse, getting lost on your way to a retread. And of course, not knowing your audience will cost you sales. The more materials I see, the less I think there is one sure-fire system that works for each language. No one develops courses for free. I am doing what I am doing because I *hate* what is available for my students. Hate. I am dead certain that what I have is better. Is it really better? Maybe. But at the very least I get the satisfaction of knowing that there are 60 young Latin students who are using materials I don't hate and $300. And that may have to be compensation enough. (I hate paradigms and word lists without real language, if you're curious what is driving me.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6555 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 12 of 16 08 October 2011 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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If a program has lots of drilling, like MT, make sure there is enough time between the drills to answer without
stopping the recording. Even though some courses are designed for pausing, I sometimes just let them run continuously, so it's nice to have this option. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 16 10 October 2011 at 11:12am | IP Logged | ||
I disagree completely. What is "enough time"? It varies by individual, and most preprogrammed pauses are too long for me, so I get bored waiting. But sometimes the task is too difficult (or maybe I just get distracted) and I don't get the answer before the pause is finished. Preprogrammed pauses were devised before pausable media were invented, and it's now nothing more than a self-sustaining "habit" in the industry. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| H.Computatralis Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6309 days ago 130 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Polish*, French, English Studies: German, Spanish, Latin | Message 14 of 16 10 October 2011 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Cainntear:
To each their own method. I, for one, like to practice the FSI drills while doing my morning workout and since I have my hands busy I can't pause after each question. Sure, some pauses are too long others too short but the idea of having a pause is not in itself that bad. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 16 10 October 2011 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, in that case, have your main version on audio CD without pauses and have a bonus disc of MP3 resources -- the whole course in MP3, a "hands-off" version with preprogrammed pauses and various revision resources, number drills etc.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6555 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 16 of 16 11 October 2011 at 5:01am | IP Logged | ||
Let me clarify. The first time I do a course that's designed to be paused, I usually pause. After I feel comfortable, I often review the course without pausing. Most courses I've used have long enough pauses to allow one to physically say the answer before it is played. This includes all the MT courses except French vocab builder, which is a piece of carp. Other courses that sometimes don't provide enough pause time are the audio components from textbooks, etc. Having the option to play it straight through is really nice. I bet the original MT courses were designed for this too, since the long answers have more pause time than the short answers. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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