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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 7165 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 10 08 September 2008 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I just started teaching English at a university in China. The students still make some pretty basic mistakes (he vs she, not using past tenses to talk about the past, confusing subject & object pronouns) & it occurred to me it'd be great to have an FSI-style audio-lingual course to hand to refer them to as needed. (ie "You're confusing he & him, she & her, you need to practice these drills until you make this mistake less often.")
Does anyone know of such a course? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 10 08 September 2008 at 7:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't know, and I'm not sure I'd want to.
The problem with drills is that they're very superficial -- they don't make the student produce the language, so they don't strengthen the mental associations required to avoid the mistake in future. In practise, the goal is to improve the process but behaviourist principles (as informed the audio-lingual method) erroneously take a correct product as an appropriate indicator that the process is correct. (If a man produces a photo-realistic picture on his computer, it doesn't give any indication of his skill with a camera.) Plenty of people get so good at drills that they can pass written exams with flying colours, yet still can't string a sentence together when they need to speak. Edited by Cainntear on 08 September 2008 at 7:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7165 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 3 of 10 08 September 2008 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"In practise, the goal is to improve the process but behaviourist principles... erroneously take a correct product as an appropriate indicator that the process is correct."
Regardless of your assessment of the behaviourist principles which originally inspired audio-lingualism, you'll find plenty of people on this forum (including the founder, the OP of this recent thread & myself) who that find audio-lingual style drills work in helping them produce correct sentences. Perhaps according to the latest theory they shouldn't. But practice suggests otherwise. & though audio-lingual techniques were originally inspired by behaviourism, they can probably be justified based on more recent cog sci theory (eg connectionism - audio-lingual drills are very similar to some methods used to train artificial neural networks). "Plenty of people get so good at drills that they can pass written exams with flying colours, yet still can't string a sentence together when they need to speak." This is precisely the thing audio drills - as opposed to written drills, which have exactly the property you describe - seem to be good for fixing (or preventing if used from the start). Having the right word order, verb conjugation, participles, pronouns etc on the tip of your tongue when you need to produce them. So lets forget about the theoretical objections. If anyone knows of such a course for English it'd be much appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| linqvist Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6337 days ago 32 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, Vietnamese* | Message 4 of 10 08 September 2008 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The Defense Language Institute English Language Center in San Antonio, Texas, USA, has a very comprehensive system based on drills as you have inquired. My parent learned English here back in the early 1960's.
http://www.dlielc.org/welcome_dli/index.html http://www.dlielc.org/courses/index.html The materials they sell are very expensive, and I don't know if they are available to civilians. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7165 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 10 September 2008 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks linqvist - you found the unicorn for me. & it is available to civies. Unfortunately it'd cost my annual salary here to buy a "starter pack"! I had a look on ERIC but nothing so far :( Perhaps I'll have to roll my own... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lang_lang Newbie United States Joined 5926 days ago 15 posts - 15 votes | Message 6 of 10 10 September 2008 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I would suggest to practice with dialogues in the class. Practice he, she, etc. until it is clear how it is used. Then, move forward with him. If they do not get it in the class, listening to it outside of class will not make them "get it" either. I would first play the audio in class and review it...as you probably already were going to do :-\ I believe if you practice, practice and practice one aspect of the languge at a time and have them speak it as often and frequently as possible together, that will work better. However, once they get it, then I would give them additional listening practice...maybe video might be even more beneficial so they can see facial expressions.
You are a very fortunate educator to have the opportunity to teach abroad. How awesome is that! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 10 11 September 2008 at 5:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My objections may be theoretical but they're backed up empirically, while your counter-objections are circumstantial.
Anyway, there are bucket-loads of drill *books* out there, but the cost of recording means that audio isn't seen as viable for supplementary materials -- I've only ever seen recordings for main course books. It's roll-your-own time, I'm afraid. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7165 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 8 of 10 13 September 2008 at 7:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
If you consider the experience of the thousands of students who pass through the FSI every year circumstantial, you have a very narrow understanding of "empirical". If you could point me to a summary of your evidence I'd be interested to see it though.
This could be why more grammar-based approaches aren't very successful - most published courses, treat the written as primary, & fail to provide enough audio-lingual :) work to help students reach oral fluency.
http://www.freeenglishnow.com/ Unfortunately they've been rolled by Christians, & rather than using made-up dialogs at the beginning of each lesson, FSI style, they've used passages from the bible. Issues of religious neutrality - I don't think using this would be permissible in a university in China - aside this doesn't strike me as an optimal sample of language. - Although they've used a modern English version of the bible, this is in a somewhat literary register, unlike informal speech - It doesn't predominantly consist of speech, which presumably should be their model, since that's what the coures is trying to teach - It uses many proper nouns not relevant to (the non-Christian aspects of) modern life. The drills seem to be less affected by these problems though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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