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Language classes do NOT work

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garyb
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 Message 25 of 116
08 December 2011 at 11:10am | IP Logged 
As much as I like to moan about how bad my high school French classes are, we did learn a lot of useful stuff and it gave me a foundation in the language which helped me pick it back up again later. Very inefficiently of course, but that's more because of the fact that it was a big class with many people who weren't motivated to learn and avoided speaking; we had a teacher who, despite being passionate about the language, had to follow the badly-designed curriculum which focused almost exclusively on vocabulary and grammar (she kept complaining that she wanted to give us more speaking exercises and get us talking to French people over the Internet and all sorts but these ideas just didn't fly with the senior staff); and of course because it was only a few classes per week.

I don't see why a frequent class with a good curriculum that matches the students' goals, a good teacher, and a small group of motivated students who study between classes would not work well and be more efficient than self-learning alone as the teacher could catch and correct bad habits as they develop, but that's rarely the case. So I avoid language classes.

I did a few private lessons a while ago. They were definitely helpful but could have been more so, due to the teacher being fairly inexperienced and me not knowing exactly what I wanted from the lessons beyond "improving my French" (something that a more experienced teacher might have helped me identify and focus on). At the time I just chose the cheapest teacher I could find because my logic was that I just needed someone to speak French with, but looking back I probably could have got a lot more out of it with a more experienced teacher.

I also go to a conversation group where a native speaker leads the conversation, which is useful but I don't kid myself that it's some sort of lesson as opposed to just a conversation practice. If the "tutors" were willing to correct people's mistakes then maybe I'd consider it a lesson and it would be even more useful.

Anyway that's my mixed bunch of thoughts. Basically classes are a great idea in theory but rarely work as well as they could in practice.
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Cainntear
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 Message 26 of 116
08 December 2011 at 4:59pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
s_allard wrote:
I really think that a blanket statement that language classes don't work is an exaggeration.
if we're talking about reaching fluency then I don't think it's an exaggeration.

If the statement was "language classes alone do not work", I might agree with you, but it doesn't say that. I don't think anyone here would expect to achieve genuine fluency from classes alone, but a good class will get you to the stage where you can really get out there and practice much sooner than self-study will.



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jed
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 Message 27 of 116
08 December 2011 at 6:57pm | IP Logged 
It is a pity that more schools don't have immersion classes in a foreign language.

For a time, I lived in Kuwait. Kids in the state schools took an hour of English a day, five days a week, taught in a very traditional way. By the time they left school, about 2% (the really motivated ones) were great - good enough to enroll in engineering and medical courses that are taught exclusively in English. Of the other 98% however, only about half were very good at all - not a particularly good return on a twelve-year investment.

However, there are also a number of private schools in Kuwait where English is not taught at all as a foreign language. Instead, students are immersed in English, with certain (or sometimes all) subjects being taught only in English from day one. While some of the kids who graduate from these schools don't have particularly great writing (but then neither do a lot of American/British kids who leave school), most of them speak and understand spoken English effortlessly.

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Ari
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 Message 28 of 116
09 December 2011 at 6:58am | IP Logged 
jed wrote:
It is a pity that more schools don't have immersion classes in a foreign language.

I remember reading a study about such schools in Sweden. Looking at the competences of the students, the study concluded that their English was slightly better and their everything else significantly worse. This, the study concluded, was because they're taught in a foreign language.

Of course, this was just one study in one country, but remember Sweden has one of the best non-native English rates in the world.
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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 29 of 116
09 December 2011 at 7:39pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
If the statement was "language classes alone do not work", I might agree with you, but it doesn't say that. I don't think anyone here would expect to achieve genuine fluency from classes alone, but a good class will get you to the stage where you can really get out there and practice much sooner than self-study will.


I totally agree. The ones complaining about language classes have probably had the worst teachers (and/or fellow students) as well as the best self-study experiences.

Personally, I learned most of my English in school, and obviously got most of my practice out of school. I didn't travel abroad until long after that, Internet wasn't in use in the early 1990s and so on. I also got an acceptable foundation in Spanish thanks to my language classes (and hard work). Not that there weren't better ways to make class time more effective...(to this day, I've never found songs to be a good method, and I've been playing music for 25 years now!).

While I'm sure there are some really bad teachers around, there are surely really (REALLY) bad students who wouldn't learn even from Michel Thomas nor the best self-study method out there (whichever that may be).

I've had classmates who couldn't write a grammatically decent text, despite having studied English for at least half a dozen years (and been exposed to the language passively through popular media).

From Slavs being super talented in languages:
A student who doesn't pay attention won't improve regardless of the nationality of the teacher, while an avid student finds ways to improve even with a non-native.

Correspondingly, I think the same can be said about learning materials.

There are good and bad teachers, good and bad students, good and bad study material and good and bad methods.
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William Camden
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 Message 30 of 116
11 December 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged 
I think if you can find a class or a tutor in an L2, do so. Autodidacticism has its advantages, but it has disadvantages as well. For example, if you are entirely self-taught, it is easy for your errors to become fossilised. A half-decent teacher or tutor will help you remove them but the total autodidact will continue to bog down in error.
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Serpent
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 Message 31 of 116
11 December 2011 at 10:48pm | IP Logged 
William Camden wrote:
A half-decent teacher or tutor will help you remove them but the total autodidact will continue to bog down in error.
Hm, at my former uni teachers would often point out people's errors and say they gotta work on this or that thing on their own. Sometimes they'd recommend a specific textbook but imo that's not that different from a native speaker simply saying you make the same mistake a lot.

And that's f**king Moscow State Linguistics Uni, groups of 10 people max, everyone actually wanting to improve their English...a better situation than at many classroom courses.
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Elexi
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 Message 32 of 116
12 December 2011 at 11:54am | IP Logged 
I think one of the major problems of language schools is the number of students in a language class. I once did a pretty expensive Spanish course (£400 in 1992) at one of the London universities. As it was a university there was a dedicated language lab with all the gear, the teacher was nice, patient and a Columbian who had moved to Spain in her early 20s and thus spoke good Castilian, although perhaps she was not the best teacher. Further, most of the students were intelligent having at least A levels and maybe a degree. BUT there were 15 students in the class. No way was any progress going to be made with that number - if someone didn't get something or had failed to do their homework, the class stalled. Most dropped out after a while wasting their investment.

I read somewhere that for intermediate language and above FSI have no more than 4 to a class and this sounds about right, if uneconomical.


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