Putting Michel Thomas into practice

So I've finally found myself using Michel Thomas's techniques (or at least my interpretation of them) in the language classroom.

When I started my current job, I made the decision that I was going to do exactly what the school wanted of me, and stop worrying about the ineffectiveness of standard techniques -- after all, standard techniques are what the school sells, and therefore what the students have bought. Basically, I figured that I needed to start looking at teaching as a job rather than some kind of holy calling, so that I could go home at the end of the day and switch off, rather than beating myself up until bedtime for the day's errors.

It's ironic, then, that the student who's getting the most "me" in my teaching is the second class I started. I went in preparing to teach the standard course, and with only a couple of hours until the class started, I discovered that the method materials were aimed at large classes, and were inappropriate to a one-on-one class, so I went to the syllabus and wrote down the language features for the first few lessons. To be, to have, there is/are... OK, fine. The various things pointed in a direction I wasn't intending to head in, but there it was: Total Physical Response. For about half a dozen lessons we were putting things in a box, on a chair, on the floor... even on my head. I was lucky that I'd recently got in an online discussion about "Language Hunting" just before, as I had whole system analysed and fresh in my head.

The student was herself a teacher -- in fact, a headteacher -- and understood a lot about pedagogy. This was a double-edged sword, as while she was open to different ideas, she got kind of fixated on the "concreteness" of the TPR class, and was slightly reluctant to move on until I'd built up her confidence in herself and in me as a teacher. Once that confidence was there, it was time to switch, and switch we did.

Compliments from students are always welcome, but when they come from a trained and experienced teacher, they really feel good. Of course, at the same time, I recognise that it's the techniques drawing the praise, not me.

Teaching Michel Thomas style is actually even more difficult than I really appreciated. The last time I tried it, I wasn't teaching full-time, and I had enough space in my head to balance the repetition of the various language points, but in these classes I frequently find myself leaving revision of a particular word or structure late, and the student has forgotten it. She blames herself, when of course it's my fault. I'm trying to develop ways of notating and mnemonicising for myself to keep track of what to revise and when.

But overall, it's been clearly very effective, and it's reinforced my belief that Thomas's core methodology is constructed on sound concepts, and that there was nothing miraculous about Thomas as a teacher.

If there's a stressful element in it, it's seeing how much the lesson suffers when the teacher's on an off-day, something that doesn't happen as much when you're hiding behind worksheets and programmed materials. On the flip-side, though, this connection between teacher performance and learning eliminates the great existential angst of the teacher: "Are they learning because of me or despite me?"

Video commentary: 5 techniques to speak any language

Sometimes it's nice to run with a theme, and although I'm mixed it up with a few unrelated posts in between, I started discussing what we can learn from learners a couple of weeks ago, and followed up with a discussion on the limits of my own self-awareness. I figure it makes sense to build on this theme and have a critical look at what others say.

I came across the following video last month, where Sid Efromovich presents his "5 techniques to speak any language" at TEDx UpperEastSide. You can watch the video (~15 min) now to make up your own mind, or skip straight down to my analysis.



Now, the first thing to note is that the video blurb says that Sid grew up in Brazil, which tells us that either he is an exceptionally good learner (I never noticed any flaws in his English) or that he was a childhood bilingual -- unfortunately not even his personal website tells us which. Not knowing his starting point makes it quite difficult to evaluate how suitable he is as a model for any individual (if he's natively bilingual in Portuguese and English, that wouldn't be particularly unusual, but for those of us who were brought up monolingually, it doesn't match our world).

Now lets move on to the actual talk, and Sid's rules.

1: Make mistakes

My first reaction when he gave the title was "here we go again," as I expected the usual line about how we learn from our mistakes. Yes, we are more than capable from learning from our mistakes, from which the hardliners conclude that there is no learning without mistakes... and yet the things I've learned best were learned right first time.

Thankfully, that's not what Eric goes on to discuss. Instead, he talks about how we all have a "database" of sounds and structures that our brains identify as correct, and that everything outside that database is flagged as "wrong" by the brain.

This throws us into a little paradox where our fear of making mistakes causes us to make mistakes.

His example is the Spanish letter R, which he gives with the word "Puerta". The Spanish R is markedly different from the English R, but close enough that a beginner's brain will try to replace the wrong-sounding Spanish R with a correct-sounding English one, which Eric refers to as the "closest relative sound".


In this rule we have something of real value to the learner. I've discussed the difficulty of dealing with foreign phoneme maps many times, but I never made that last logical step and talked about perceived wrongness and correctness, so a big thank you to Eric -- this idea alone made the video worth watching for me.

Caveat emptor

However, in that same example of puerta, Eric starts to show the limitations of his language awareness, as he appears to be claiming that it is only the Spanish R that isn't in the English "database", which is simply untrue.

The P, though close, is subtly different, as Spanish is a language more typically distinguished by aspiration, and English by voicing (in the pairs P/B, T/D, C/G). It's a very subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

The Spanish UE doesn't exist in English, and any attempt at approximating it is going to be wrong -- one typical English pronunciation of Puerto Rico is /ˌpwɛərtə ˈriːkoʊ/, whereas the Spanish is /pʷeɾto ˈriko/.

Finally, there's that last syllable ta. This has a clear vowel, because all Spanish syllables do... but not all English ones. It is exceptionally difficult for an English speaker to pronounce a clear vowel in the syllable directly preceding or following the stressed syllable, because in English these are almost always reduced to schwa -- that feeble little "uh" sound.

So there's the first alarm bell... his pronunciation is good enough to show that he internally knows the difference, but he's not consciously aware of everything he does, which (as I keep saying) is the limitation of anyone who claims to speak from experience.

 

2 Scrap the foreign alphabet

Rule number 2 is a doozy. Eric reckons that the foreign alphabet "will give you wrong signals," at least for languages in the same script as your own, and he is correct. It is difficult for an English speaker to see the letter "I" as representing it's so called "cardinal" value (the Latin I) because that's not the sound it has in English.
So far, so logical. What is the alternative?

Some (not Eric) propose learning aurally first, ignoring writing completely. (I disagree, because there are differences that a beginner might not be able to hear in the spoken language, but they'll be seen in the written language.)

But Eric is in favour of writing down. Does he suggest learning the IPA? No, instead he proposes using your own pseudo-phonetics, based on the sounds of your own language.

His example for this whole section is the Brazilian currency: the Real. It's a great example, because it is immediately misleading, having as it does the same spelling as an English word. His suggested phoneticisation, though, is very troubling: hey ouch . In writing it this way, he's using the same "closest relative sounds" he warned against in rule 1, which is a total contradiction. A Brazilian Portuguese R is not like an English H: it's a guttural sound, more similar to the German/Scottish CH (Bach/loch)... but not even quite the same as that. The L isn't quite the w-glide of ow/ouch, and even if it was, you're going to have to find a different notation for it in different situations (in can occur after vowels that an English W wouldn't appear after). And there are other problems too, but that'll do for now.

The main thing is that having presented only two rules, we already have a contradiction and fundamental incompatibility, throwing into doubt Sid's credibility as an instructor.

But setting that aside for a moment and looking at this rule in isolation:

Avoiding the native spelling is by no means a necessary step in learning a language.

Myself, I have at times learned to pronounce a language from its written form before making any serious attempt to learn the language, and to me that's far more useful, because I'm able to look at dictionaries and phrasebooks to learn new language, whereas if I'm stuck with my own idiosyncratic phonetics, I won't have access to any external sources whatsoever. I say learn the alphabet, but learn it right. Even if idiosyncratic phonetics did work (and I don't think they do), the cost in terms of isolation from materials is simply too high.

3 Find a stickler

He reckons you need someone who'll correct you, and you probably do, but he doesn't address the serious limitations of this, or how to avoid them.

First of all, correction is ad hoc. You say what you want, you get a correction. Fine, but language and a system, and therefore effective correction has to be systematic. A lot of the corrections you get from a native speaker are going to be extremely different from what your mistake was, and therefore don't really correct the source of the error, just the superficial form.

Secondly, if you make an error, you may be misunderstood. If someone says "I will do it yesterday," do they mean "I will do it tomorrow" or "I did it yesterday"? Where an error is ambiguous, the correction given has as much chance of being totally wrong as being right.

But worst of all, sticklers often teach things that are outdated. For example, the English you and I as subject isn't current in most parts of the English speaking world, but a stickler will "correct" you and me even if says it himself. Similarly for there's three things. Or he might "correct" can I...? to may I...?

How do you avoid these things? How do you choose your stickler? Well, for the first one, you're not looking for a language buddy, you're looking for a teacher. For the second and third, you're looking for a good teacher. You need someone who is an expert not only in the language, but in showing others how to become experts.

4 Shower conversations

Eric then suggests talking to yourself, a technique lots of people use. For many of us, that language practice is in the form of a silent internal monologue. The acknowledged limitation with this is that it's not practising pronunciation.

Eric's idea of having your conversations in the shower gives you a safe area to practice pronunciation, but the bigger point he raises is that by having a conversation as opposed to a monologue, you're more likely to identify gaps in your knowledge.

I'm not sure that this is actually true, and as a result he glides by what should have been his most important point, and worthy of being a rule in and of itself: mind your gaps.

When you're speaking, it will be your natural tendency to avoid and skirt round gaps in your target language knowledge, and doing so is part of being a successful user of the language. However, it is all too easy to become so proficient at avoiding gaps that you stop looking for them, and stop learning new things. The really successful learners continually seek out gaps in their knowledge and plug them with new information. Obviously it's less embarrassing to identify those gaps when you're on your own than when you're in a conversation, so it's a good starting point, but on the other hand, the reality is that you cannot say anything to yourself that you don't expect, so you can't find as many gaps speaking to yourself as you can when speaking to others. If you can be bothered, you can carry a notebook to jot down any gaps you come across, but while I had such a notebook for years (for Spanish), I only ever noted down 2 or 3 things in it...

5 Buddy Formula

Sid's final rule is a "formula" for finding the best "language buddy" for practise. Now I object to the trite, twee abuse of the term "formula" here, because it's just a rule that he chooses to write with an equals sign:

Target language = best language in common

He raises a very good point in his justification for this: that clear communication is the motivation for learning a language, and that if you know you can get your message across more easily in another language, you're going to switch to that other language.

You will get no argument from me on that -- I often find myself banging into that wall, and I often caution against so-called "immersion" classes where the class has a common language anyway (eg. immersive Gaelic for English speakers) because it risks conditioning people to view the language as a barrier to communication instead of a means of communication.

But more than that, Sid offers no advice to dealing with the big problem that all learner-learner conversations carry: learner errors. If one English learner says pod-ae-to, and the other says pod-ah-to, they're both wrong, and there's no stimulus for correction. Or perhaps one of them gets it right, then the other gives a well-meaning "correction" that teaches them the wrong thing.
...unfortunately, no feedback on errors.

Overall

So what can we take away from Eric's advice? Even if his rules were all unarguably correct, they alone are not going to teach you a language -- in fact, they're pretty peripheral to the main learning process.

But his rules aren't correct. Rule 2 is a dogmatic assertion that glosses over a very complex issue.

Neither rule 3 or rule 5 is wrong per se, but neither is essential, and Sid's description is inadequate as advice for the learner, because it doesn't give any concrete advice on how to circumvent any of the problems a learner will face.

Rule 4 fails on similar, but slightly more interesting, grounds. Again, he has failed to really give enough advice on how to avoid potential pitfalls, but in rules 3 and 5, those were pitfalls I don't believe he'd really thought about himself. With rule 4, he does talk briefly about the pitfalls. He identified a problem, and identified a suitable solution. He has used that solution and it should be useful to many others. But there is nothing unique in the shower conversation that forces you to identify your language gaps. If his rule had been "Mind the gap", his shower conversation could have been given as one possible technique to address it, and then he would have been forced into providing a description of how to structure a shower conversation such that it addresses the goals of a "mind the gap" rule.

TPR: how to teach Creole...?

I'm suffering from a persistent head cold that's messing up my right ear.  It's not just clogged or muffled, there appears to be some fluid buildup behind the drum that's messing around with frequencies and stuff.  So I went to the doctor, who really wasn't interested in my history (this has happened before, and the last doctor said it was liable to recurr) and more interested in what he could see (which isn't much, because the ear canal is badly inflamed).

Well, he's lived up to the stereotype of the French medical system and prescribed me more medicine than even my dear old granny had in the final years of her life.  The sound in my ear doesn't appear to be getting any worse, which probably means it's getting better.  (The last time I went back to the doctor several times over the course of the month complaining that it wasn't getting better, until eventually I got a different doctor who told me that even though the infection was gone, the fluid would take a long time to drain away, and there really was nothing to worry about.

It's not easy teaching a language when sounds are messed up, but in practical terms it only means that the students have to be more careful with their pronunciation.

But one little conversation in the waiting room really sparked my interest.  There was a guy there who must have been in his 60s.  His dad had been in the French military, so he had spent a lot of his younger years in Africa, where he had also been involved in teaching French to the locals, and his opinion on teaching was simple: "you have to move; there has to be movement".

Even though he wasn't familiar with the terminology, he was talking about the principles behind Total Physical Response: learning by reacting to commands, and then moving on to giving commands.  I'd been reading an amateur ebook on Mauritian Creole a couple of nights before, and something clicked...

Verbs in Mauritian Creole don't conjugate, and they have at most two forms: a "long form" with an /e/ sound at the end and a short form without it.  (There are some verbs with only one form, ending in a consonant.)  These two forms are more or less the singular and plural imperative forms: (you boy,) do that! and (you lot) do that!

On reflection, I may have jumped the gun a bit, because most French verbs in a fair percentage of their conjugations match quite closely with one of these two forms (parler, parlez, parlé, parlait, parlaient etc are all pronounced the same).

Still, there's enough data there to make me wonder, even if I can't draw a firm conclusion, because most French verbs not ending in -er (/e/) in the infinitive still become -ez (/e/) in the plural imperative.

The responsibility for the formation of Creole languages is often put down to the speakers themselves trying to muddle through the best they can, but isn't it possible that the pedagogy of the imperial powers has contributed to it to?

I doubt the man I was chatting to had ever heard of James Asher (the "inventor" of TPR) and I imagine he was doing what the French military and overseas administration had been doing for ages, given that their teachers probably knew little or nothing of the local tongues.

I'm certainly preinclined to accept this theory, as I have encountered a lot of very common errors in learner English that don't have their origins in native-language interference, and can therefore only be explained as teaching errors....

Is language subconscious?

Is language subconscious?  It's a question I hadn't given much thought to -- I'd always pretty much taken it for granted that it was.

Well anyway, apparently it's been a pretty contentious topic in linguistics and psychology for a while now, but a group of scientists from Hebrew University have found compelling evidence that it is, indeed, subconscious.  (And not only "language" language, but even symbolic mathematical language to an extent).

Discussing this elsewhere called to mind a time when I was working on learning Scottish Gaelic with the aid of a piece of software.  It flashed the word "eye" up on the screen, and I couldn't translate it.  I had a complete block.  I knew the word.  I knew I knew the word.  But it wouldn't come.

It felt to me like my brain didn't believe it was "eye", and that it wasn't sure it wasn't "I", or "aye" (or possibly even "ay").

The way I see it, a conscious language skill should have allowed me to override this confusion through conscious attention to the written form, which is (in theory) unambiguous.  The fact that I couldn't force my way through to the correct meaning suggested that language is something you have less conscious control over than you think....

But fair enough, I've always felt that contextless words are very much a first step, and that for the most part you should be practising in context.  This experience kind of confirmed it for me.

But the publishing of the findings came at the perfect time for me, having just written the draft of my last blog post about translation, and the way I automatically translated frames of reference (eg using the first person when the software says "you are..." etc), because that's the source of my dilemma:

Translation is effective precisely because native language is understood subconsciously.  You understand and internalise the meaning effortlessly.  This means you know exactly what message you want to express in the target language.  There is no other means for a teacher, book or software package to indicate so clearly to a learner what do say.  Also, there is no other means to ensure that the teacher knows exactly what the student is trying to say (I've heard many teachers "correct" students errors by leading them to say something that is valid in the target language, but completely different in meaning to what they intended to say).

Translation is ineffective if and whenever the native language is not understood subconsciously.  Too many courses present contrived, meaningless examples.  Perhaps these aren't quite as nonsensical as the examples the researchers from Hebrew University used, but as long as they are unnatural, they will interfere with subconscious processing, leaving the learner to process them consciously -- it's not "translation" that's the real problem here, it's "word juggling".

And translation's weak spot is the one I mentioned in my last blog post: our subconscious deals with relative references automatically.  When you say the word "I" to me, I understand the concept of you, the person speaking.  So dealing with first and second person pronouns is a perilous task.  In order to do it correctly, the student has to stop using their subconscious processing, and language starts to become a conscious process... which is when translation stops working as a language learning technique.

This leads me to a conclusion that I really didn't expect, and that I'm not yet fully convinced of:
the optimal mixture of native-language instruction and target-language instruction in the classroom isn't a simple function of how advanced the students are, it goes right down to the level of "I" vs "he".

Wow.

The weirdness of learning something you already "know"...

I've started looking at starting on Corsican a few times, but it's always seemed really difficult.  Why?  Because all the beginners' stuff looks too obvious to me to be worth looking at.  If it's not like Italian, it's like Spanish or French.  Everything I'd found was phrase-based, and I could understand most of them with no effort.  My brain saw no reason for effort.

That's something I find quite interesting, because I've always argued that extrinsic motivation (motivation from outside the material/course) is not enough -- all teaching has to be intrinsically motivating.

Well, today I came across a slightly better site (for French speakers).  The lessons there aren't brilliant, as they're just information and the exercises on the site aren't related to the lessons.

But the information's there, so I can juggle it about to suit myself.

Maybe it's time to dive back into the Python NLTK and write myself a wee bit of self-teaching software....

Ooooh... it looks like I was wrong....

For years, I've been toeing the line that non-native languages never become like native languages, and that there's two language processing mechanisms in the brain: one for the infant learner, and one for the adult-learner.  This was science's best guess based on the data they had to hand: victims of "selective aphasia".  These people had suffered brain damage that had affected their abilities in languages, but not equally across languages.  The observed pattern was that all native languages would be affected more or less equally, and all non-native languages would be affected more or less equally, but the two would often be differently affected.
Well, via an article in the New York Times, I came across this paper at PLoS ONE that says otherwise.  Apparently they've been able to track the brainwaves of learners and find that there are similarities between the brainwaves of a proficient learner and patterns typical of the native.  This I find really cool.  (I wish I could afford a brainscanner so that I could measure my proficiency in terms of native-like brainwaves!!)

I'm concerned, though, that one thing they say will be overinterpreted:

Interestingly, both before and after the delay the implicitly trained group showed more native-like processing than the explicitly trained group, indicating that type of training also affects the attainment of native-like processing in the brain.

There are many people who advocate immersion from day one, and this would appear to be proof of the efficacy of the approach.  However, we are dealing with a very simple language here -- 13 words and a handful of extra inflectional morphemes, leading to a sum total of 1404 possible sentences in the language.  Even if the grammar's very different from English, there's still a very small number of "decision points" to be considered, so it is much easier to devine the meaning from the context -- this is something that just doesn't match the experience with real language.

They do, of course, admit as much in the body of the paper:

it may be that the results reported here are due to the limited size of the artificial language

Furthermore, the study says:

In the explicit training condition, participants were provided with 13.5 minutes of input of a type similar to that found in traditional grammar-focused classroom settings. Auditorily-presented metalinguistic explanations structured around word categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) were presented along with meaningful Brocanto2 phrases and sentences (which were also auditorily-presented, together with visually-presented corresponding game board configurations).

It's a shame the paper doesn't include the script.  My concern here is with the mention of "metalinguistic explanations".  Explicit instruction does not necessarily mean a lot of "metalinguistic" explanations -- yes, it will always require some, but often what starts out as an explanation overcomplicates things with unnecessary jargon and overly conscious processing.  Finely tuned explicit input can be very clear to the learner even if it looks messy on paper, and poorly tuned explicit input can be nigh-on impenetrable to the learner even if it looks neat on paper.

Which is why I object when they claim that:

A second possibility is that at end of training the explicit group's dependence on explicit, declarative memory-based knowledge resulted in the inhibition of the learning or use of procedural knowledge (see above), thus precluding anterior negativities. On this view, explicit training actually prevents, or at least slows, the development of native-like processing.

It is impossible for them to state that explicit training in particular prevents anything -- but that the training that they provided did.  (Of course, if I was to see their scripts, I'd definitely find fault with them, but that could always be me rationalising away anything that disagrees with me -- classic confirmation bias.  We're all guilty of it at times.)

Anyway, despite their statements about the difference between the explicit and implicit instruction, the  study does state towards the end:

the implication of declarative and procedural memory in this study is consistent with the predictions made by the declarative/procedural model for second language acquisition. This neurocognitive model posits that during L2 learning grammar initially depends largely on declarative memory, but that gradually aspects of grammar are increasingly learned and processed in procedural memory.

I am heartened to see that they haven't out-and-out supported the hardline distinction between "learning" and "acquisition" that Krashen and his ilk propose.

So it looks like I may have been wrong about the neurological differences between native and adult-learned languages, and I might still be proven wrong about the benefits of explicit vs implicit instruction, but this is not the study that proves that one.  If and when one comes along, I'll rethink my position.  Until then, I'll stick with what I currently believe.

A Happy Accident in the Computer Room

I'd been working on an essay on my laptop, but I didn't have a Gaelic spellchecker installed.  Never mind - it was actually quite helpful to me to have to look up words in a dictionary when i wasn't sure (and I used a web-based one, so it didn't take long).

So when I was finished, I emailed it to my university mail account and went to the computer room to use the spellchecker there.

When I had opened up the message and I was just about to double-click the attachment, I realised my mistake: I had saved it Microsoft .DOC (Word) format, not .ODT; and the Gaelic spellchecker is only installed as part of OpenOffice.org, not Microsoft Office.  This meant that I was about open it in a word processor without a Gaelic spellchecker.

But rather than saving it and opening manually in OpenOffice, I double-clicked anyway.  Why?
Because I realised I would learn more by doing so.  I opened up OpenOffice as well, and copied and pasted the text across.  I let OpenOffice highlight the errors, then I manually corrected them in Microsoft Word.

I'm pretty sure I learnt more that way than I ever did clicking Accept... Accept... Accept... Accept... Accept....

Learning a related language without trying...?

So, you know French and Spanish and want to learn Catalan?   English and German and want to learn Dutch?  Polish and Russian, and Ukranian?  It should be dead easy, right?  All you need to do is start reading and you'll get it.

Possibly, but it's still worth picking up a book and doing a bit of study.

Eliminate the negatives:
If you just start reading (and/or listening), you will develop a reasonable passive understanding, but there's a couple of ways this limits you.  Passive understanding does not require you to process all the language in front of you (you can gain complete comprehension without complete perception) so you are never forced to develop an accurate internal model of the language.

This can be very limiting, because in the future, if you decide to learn to speak the language then you're faced with a massive "frustration barrier" -- a lot of people find that being able to understand lots but not answer is a very unpleasant situation.  It seems more discouraging to me at times than simply having low skills all round.

Accentuate the positives:
Besides, the most important thing stage of learning a related language is the very basics.  How so?  Well this is about the nature of regular and irregular language forms (as I've been talking a bit about recently).

Irregular forms are almost always the most common forms.  So in English "child, children" vs "adolescent, adolescents"; "give, gave" vs "donate, donated".

Interestingly enough, it's those most common words that are least stable.  The English word "will" (I will go, etc) developed from a word meaning "to want" (compare Modern German will and the Modern English noun will -- eg strength of will, willpower), whereas "want" originally meant "to lack" (they found him wanting, ie inadequate).

The same effects can be seen in other language families -- while the Italian and French words for "to have" come from the Latin "avere", the Spanish word for to have (I have a car etc) is derived for the Latin word to hold -- "tenere".  But when we get to a rarer word like "cultivate", we have an almost identical word: cultiver(FR), coltivare (IT), cultivar(ES).

So when a Spanish person says they can "understand" Italian or Catalan without ever having studied it, they genuinely believe that they can, because they can understand what they think are the "difficult" words, but are in reality the easy words.

The mistake most people in this situation make is to skip the beginners' material and jump straight to the advanced.  But it's the beginners' material that teaches most of the things you really need to learn. 

A little bit of time dedicated to the basics (conjugations, pronouns, declensions) at the start will accelarate you through to 90% understanding very quickly.

The Problem with Podcasts Part II

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problems with language learning podcasts.  I said the problem was that they modelled themselves on the form of radio programmes, and I stand by that, but I've been listening to a few podcasts since and I think there's another problem podcasts suffer, and it's maybe even more fundamental to the problem.

Podcasts are in a very awkward position when it comes to monetising their business, because their core product in fact doubles up as their primary marketing tool.

Basically, the main podcast is almost always free, and the podcasters make their money out of various add-ons: transcripts, grammar notes, flashcards, games etc.  That means that the core podcast has to continually remind the listener to go to the website.

Compare this with Pimsleur or Michel Thomas -- these courses do not need to constantly remind you what you're listening to.  Any announcements on these courses are merely as a sort of index ("advanced Spanish with Michel Thomas recording 2") or for copyright purposes.  Why so?  Because you've already bought it -- there's no need for the publisher to go chasing you for cash.

But with the podcasts, buying it doesn't stop you hearing the marketing, becuase even if you're a premium user, you get the same podcast: jingles, banter, visit-our-website messages and all.

So the problem with podcasts is a business model that goes counter to all good sense: the product actually has to be made worse in order to sell it.

And another problem with (some) podcasts

Now, not all podcasts fall into this trap, but there are several major podcasts who have made an interesting decision: subscribe and get full access to the back catalogue.  This really skews the sense of value.  JapanesePod101.com, for example, has been going for several years, and during May I downloaded seven thousand nine hundred and eighty three files covering approximately two thousand individual podcasts along with their supplementary materials on a trial offer that cost next to nothing ($1 IIRC).  Every subsequent month I would have had to pay the full subscription price, and I would have got less than twenty podcasts for that, and those 20 podcasts are over several different levels, so I'm not going to be able to use more than about 5 of them in that month.

Basically, there really is no need for anyone to subscribe for longer than a month or two, because the 17 continuous days of audio and video you get for that really isn't improved on by an extra hour or two.

This also splashes back with a secondary effect for the producers, Innovative Language Learning, because they are constantly increasing the range of --Pod101.com languages, in order to cash in on their brand.  But having got 17.2 days of podcasts for $1, where am I going to see the value in subscribing to something like PolishPod101.com, which only offers so far about 4-5 hours of phrases for absolute beginners (in 3 to 11 minute chunks, replete with the annoying jingles and banter I complained about last time) and 10 episodes of an advanced audio blog, none of which is over 5 minutes long.  There's nothing in the beginner or intermediate levels, and the advanced level hasn't had a new episode since September.  Basically, all they're offering right now is a talking phrasebook that gives you half a dozen phrase per week (if that!) and wants you to pay $10 a month for the priviledge.  This is not good value.

There is no link between cost and volume of material.  There is no guarantee of receiving any new material.  In fact, when you sign up for the "Free lifetime account", they immediately give you an "once in a lifetime" special offer on the full subscription price without giving you any opportunity to see exactly what content you're paying for.  You have to buy it "sight unseen".  You don't know how little they're offering.  You don't know whether they offer anything at your level, and they expect you to pay.  I'm sure in their heads the low level of content is justified by the low number of subscribers, but come on guys, your subscribers aren't a collective -- they're individuals, and your responsibility is to each one individually.  Don't treat them like sh*t, or it reflects on you.  It's up to the company to invest in the product.  Don't sell it until you've made it.

Good news! Fossilised errors don't exist!

It has been claimed that errors that are made frequently enough "fossilise" -- that is to say that they "harden" and become difficult to fix.  This, I feel, is overstating the case.  It's certainly easier to learn something correct to begin with than to have to "unlearn" it later in order to learn the correct form, but even then, it may be less of a big deal than people think.

The evidence

I learned French at high school from first year, and took direct entry into 3rd-year Italian as an additional language when I got the chance.  I learned Italian quicker than French.  Years later, I picked up Spanish, and learned it quicker than Italian.   More recently still, I picked up Catalan... at lightning speed.

Well, that's to be expected, right?  They are closely related languages after all.

But wait... if they are really similar, then one could describe one language in terms of another language and a set of differences.  And if you think about it, an "error" is no different from a "difference" in cognitive terms -- the only distinction is that an error is a difference that isn't shared with a whole linguistic group.

So if fossilised errors really were such a big thing, wouldn't it have been harder for me to learn Spanish after Italian, rather than easier?

And this even holds as we get to languages increasingly distant from each other, because all we're doing is increasing the number of differences, which fossilised error theory claims would make things difficult.

Taken to its logical conclusion, fossilised error theory would make adult language learning an impossible task, because every language point we learn can be considered at attempt to overcome a fossilised language pattern -- ie the equivalent language point in the native language.

The paradox propounded by promoters of fossilised errors

The idea of a fossilised error is used as a warning against attempting to say things you don't know how to.  This is pretty logical.  But the idea of fossilised errors is particularly popular among the learn-by-listening crowd.  Take the site Antimoon, and what they call "myths" about language learning:
Myth #2: "The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it"
Myth #3: "It is OK to make mistakes"
Myth #4: "As a beginner, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes"
Basically, they reckon that if you make lots of mistakes, they will fossilise and you will learn badly.  So you should listen to and read lots of examples so that you know it well before you attempt to say it.

But that's an inconsistent argument.  How can it be that we learn mistakes by speaking and learn correct language by listening?  Internally, the brain treats "correct language" and "errors" in the same way -- they're both just language forms.

So if it's the speaking that teaches us our errors, surely it's also the speaking that teaches us our correct language too?  I mean if speaking does fossilise language, surely it's to our advantage to use that to fossilise good language?

Conclusion

It's certainly a good idea to learn things properly from the word go, because it's easier.  Languages are internally more consistent, logical and systematic than many people give them credit for, and the real danger is that errors may distort the overall picture of the language, but they are never fatal and incurable.

It's better to avoid errors, but don't start distinguishing between "fresh" and "fossilised" errors and only attack the "fresh" ones.  Do not give up, because... well, it's just lazy.  If you start using "fossilisation" as an excuse, you'll find yourself making excuses for all your errors and you'll never really get as good at the language as you would like.

Dialogues from Day One.

I discussed dialogues briefly in an earlier post on expository and naturalistic language.  Fasulye suggested in the comment section that dialogues didn't necessarily lead to the use on unnaturalistic language.  OK, so I didn't say that it did -- the point I raised was that dialogues aren't a "magic bullet" that makes all language seem naturalistic.

However, that said, I'm not a big fan on dialogues anyway, so today I'm going to talk about how starting a course with dialogues from the very first lesson actually slows down progress for the learner.

My contention:
The need for a coherent dialogue forces the author to use language that the student isn't yet ready to understand.
The dialogue format forces the learner to move between such a variety of different language, that it forces the student to attempt to learn too many things at once.

I'll use as my example one of the ever-popular Teach Yourself books.

Lesson 1 TY Welsh opens with the following dialogue (my translation)
Matthew: Good morning.
Elen: Good morning. Who are you?
Matthew: I'm Matthew.
Elen: How's things? I'm Elen, the Welsh course tutor.
Matthew: I'm a learner, a very nervous learner!
Elen: Welcome to Lampeter, Matthew. Don't be nervous, everything will be fine.

What do we start off with?  It's those old favourites -- hello, what's your name etc.

But what does this teach us?

Let's have a look at the Welsh for "who are you" and "I'm Matthew":  "Pwy dych chi?" and "Matthew ydw i".

These two phrases are completely alien to the English speaker.  There is only one clue that the English speaker can use to try to make sense of this -- the name "Matthew".  A learner might assume that "pwy" and "ydw" are linked, but they're not -- "dych" goes with "ydw", even though the two are not visibly related.

This is the verb "to be", and this problem isn't unique to Welsh -- consider the English "are", "am" and "is".  So even when we look at dialogues from an entirely expository point of view, we have a problem that means we have too many unknowns for the new learner.

Consider the following (not a real example) as though it was in lesson one:
John: Are you tired?
Sally: Yes, I am tired.

You as a learner are asked to contrast the question with the answer, but we have a massive amount of variation in a very simple sentence.  First of all, we have the matter of the irregular verb forms, as above.  Secondly, the pronouns are radically different (as in most languages).  Finally, we have a change of word order.  Learners could confuse their verbs and pronouns, and miss the word order entirely.

OK, that's not a real lesson 1 example, but I've already given a worse example from the Welsh course - Pwy dych chi?.  In the Welsh, the word order doesn't change for the answer Matthew ydw i, but that's arguably as difficult for an English speaker as English word order is for speakers of a language that doesn't change order.  We also have no repeated recognisable word form to highlight any the word order in Welsh.  There is an awful lot of rules in play here, each interacting to make the full meaning of the sentence.  Without seeing these in isolation, the role of individual elements is obscured.

And it's even more complicated in French.  Many courses will introduce Comment t'appelles tu? and the response Je m'appelle Jean-Pierre (or whatever name).  This introduces the complication of the reflexive pronoun, which is a version of the object pronoun.  Well, actually, the reflexive pronoun is identical to the normal object pronoun for "me" and "you", which actually makes this more confusing.  While the change of word order for the question is theoretically the same as English, the lack of auxiliary do (eg Do you know?) in French questions makes it completely different to the untrained eye.  The fact that this places the object before the subject is particularly alien to the English speaker.  This is massively difficult, and so the learner is only expected to memorise or learn to recognise the phrase.  The assumption here is that by exposure to later examples, the learner will induce the underlying patterns, but this is something that dialogues are actually very bad at.

Dialogues by their nature attempt to model naturalistic conversations, and this leads them to include a very wide variety of language.  Unfortunately, variety means very little repetition, so there is very little material to induce the rules from.  It gets worse when the writer is trying particularly hard to be naturalistic, because many of the expository cues are lost.  Remember this from earlier?  I'm a learner, a very nervous learner!  Notice that this uses elision (the ommission of repeated words) for increase naturalisticness, but missing the opportunity to reinforce the structure "I am".

French courses rarely follow up the je m'appelle with any other reflexive constructions -- the only thing it is contrasted with is usually il/elle s'appelle (he/she/it is called).  The student is left knowing the phrase for a long time without being given the input to learn why it means what it means.  In fact, this risks interfering with normal (non-reflexive) object pronouns, because the learner is overexposed to the reflexive form, and unexposed to the base form for a long time.

The root cause of the problem

The language in a naturalistic dialogue is linked by context, and elision is a major feature of natural language.
In short, we actively avoid repeating language in a conversation.

This leaves us teaching language that is only bound by context, so is semantically reinforcing, but not syntactically reinforcing.

If we progress in a language by learning a new word, it opens up a few extra possibilities, but learning new grammatical structures can double our knowledge of the language.

So imagine you know "I like...", "I have..." and "cars", "trees" and "dogs" -- you can say 6 combinations.  If you next learn to say "cats", that's an additional two sentences -- "I like cats" and "I have cats" -- so 8 in total.

But if instead you learn the negation "don't", that doubles the number of sentences to 12.

Massive growth in beginner language is only possible if you focus on teaching language points that can be combined within a sentence to make bigger and more complicated sentences.  The dialogue format militates against this, and after one dialogue-based lesson, a learner is not likely to be able to produce even as much as is in the dialogues themselves.  Compare with the Michel Thomas courses where (even excluding the -ible/-able words) the learner has a range of expression that while limited still covers dozens of different possible sentences.  By building on this, the student experiences almost exponential growth.  That's cool.

I was for a very long time confused by the acronym "TPRS".

They told me it was TPR Storytelling, where TPR was Total Physical Response.  But then they told me that it had nothing to do with TPR.  Yeah.  That's clear.

So anyway, when I was searching YouTube for language a definition of comprehensible input (see last week's post) a couple of suggestions popped up with the keyword TPRS, so I figured it was time to dive in and see what it really was about.  I personally love the idea of teaching using stories, but I have to admit I was always skeptical about the practicalities of it.

The first video I came across was this one, which is an edited video of a TPRS demonstration, so explains quite a bit about what's going on (in French with English subtitles):


(There's another few good examples that show the process by user mrtejeda, but he has switched off embedding, so I can't include any of them directly in this article.)

The basic gist of it seems to be to tell them something and ask them what you've told them, then tell them something more and ask them what you've told them, ad nauseum.

The very odd thing here is how he starts by asking them what the fish (the subject of the story is called) but rejects all supplied names in favour of one of his own choosing.  This isn't the first time I've seen this -- Pierre Capretz's video-based course French in Action does the same thing.  In the case of French in Action, this is because he has the videos prerecorded, so can't change the names on the fly, but why does the teacher in this video, where the story could easily be changed (as the only resource here is himself as storyteller), not simply accept a name from the floor?  When we talk about student engagement, we want the students to make a personal investment in the story, and getting them involved in building the story is a great way to do that.  On the other hand, asking their opinions on something then completely ignoring it is a great way to alienate your students - it shows them you don't care what they think.

The problem here isn't with the idea of storytelling as a teaching method - rather the problem is the received wisdom that asking people's names is a core beginner skill.  From this starting point, you're forced into practising asking names, and asking your students the name of the main character ends up as a staple of your early stories.  But asking names is not an intrinsically basic skill, particularly in the Romance languages where it involves use of reflexive verbs.  I actually think it could be detrimental to introduce it early, but that's a matter for another post.  Really, there are other language points that would be far better suited to TPRS than introductions and pleasantries.

But anyway, once he asked students for a name, he should have gone with it, no matter how stupid.  After all, he does appear to go on to allow one of the students to determine that the fish isn't very intelligent, and surely that's more fundamental to the story than the fish's name... (I say "appear to", because if there was a right answer, then the first respondent had a 50:50 chance of getting it right.)

Anyway, once the teacher has stopped the pointless guessing game and told them the fish's name, the class indicate their comprehension with a big clear "aaaaaaaaaaahhh", with is repeated every time the teacher provides a piece of new information.  But does it really indicate comprehension?  Note how the teacher is prompting for it - I'm sure many people in that class (or at least in my old high school) would make that noise on cue regardless of whether they understand or not.

When he asks questions about whether Fabio is a fish or a car, I'm left wondering why.  It's slowing down the story, and surely by now all the sign-language has guaranteed some level of understanding...? If the sign-language makes the input into "comprehensible input", then comprehension is achieved despite not being familiar with the word, and you are at best testing the students' ability to understand the mime, not the word. This hardly seems an appropriate goal for a language class.

In fact, there are multiple cues that tell the student they can ignore this word.
The style of questioning during comprehension check is a bit different from that in the new information section, so students will learn to distinguish between when they're being asked their opinion and when they're being asked to confirm old information.
"Voiture" is a new word in this session, and we're in a comprehension check.  "Poisson" is a word that has been said lots during that session.  "Voiture" obviously can be ignored.
And if you still haven't twigged that it's a new word, just look at the teacher.  He's miming, and he only does that with new words.  If it's a new word, you can ignore it.
It arguably takes a bad learner to go beyond this point still caring that the mime is a car, but knowing that he's miming a car just tells you that whatever he's saying isn't relevant to the story of a fish.
Very few people will be paying attention to the word at this point, so no-one's learning it.

Another problem the teacher introduces is by presenting sentences and seeking affirmation of understanding from them, blurring the boundaries between question and statement.

He does seem to get through a few different language points, but it does seem odd to me that he's talking about laughing and crying, but still needs to point out "pourquoi" on the board.  The whole thing seems just a little bit baffling, and by accepting one-word answers, we may know that they've understood the message, but we can't know that they've understood the language.  But then again, as this technique emerges from the theoretical standpoints of a "Silent Period" and of "Comprehensible Input", we already know that the teacher assumes that understanding of content comes before understanding of grammar and/or vocabulary.

The problem I have with this assumption is quite straightforward: if you can understand the message without understanding the language, why would you ever need to learn the language?  The brain generally only goes to the minimum of effort required to obtain an adequate result (which is why I assume most good learners will ignore "voiture"), and a great deal can be understood with a flawed model of the language.


Now, here's another demonstration, and notice how quiet the class is here.


The description of this video says:
"Me using my principal and his admin assistant as guinea pigs to give a demonstration of using 95% target language with high comprehension to teach Spanish. The demonstration was for the other 2 teachers in my department. The targets (off the top of my head with not much forethought) were quién, rojo & azul, masc/fem, come and canta."
So this is a class of theoretically "good" students, but they're pretty silent all the way through.  In fact, the teacher looks increasingly frantic as she keeps asking "¿Quién?" but nobody answers (presumably because they haven't worked out that this means "who?" yet).
Several times over, she asks questions by saying "quién" and then a name, which is about as good as saying in English something like "Who, Mickey Mouse?"  It's language, but it's not the common form, and in my opinion it is simplified to the point where it ceases to provide a good foundation for future learning.  It suggests that TPRS, like so many techniques, doesn't really work until you've got a basic grounding to build on.

Now think about some of the statements and questions.
"Mickey Mouse es guapo."
Really?  Mickey Mouse is good-looking?  It seems a very odd way to demonstrate a new word.  First of all, "guapo" or otherwise is a matter of subjective judgement, so is difficult to teach by example at the best of times.  Secondly, how do you make that judgement about a cartoon mouse? Mickey Mouse doesn't demonstrate the concept of "good-looking", so the students can just fumble about and say yes or no without genuinely comprehending the question.

But then she goes on to ask which of two women is better looking.  We're working in very new language and she's asking her class to make subjective judgements before they're clear on the meaning.  In subjective judgements like this, there's no right or wrong answer, so it you simply cannot check comprehension.  Yet the teacher feels the need to check comprehension and challenges the student.  Unfortunately the student does not and cannot know what's going on and there's an awkward immobile moment of silence.  Putting myself in the student's place (and while I've not been in a TPRS classroom, I have been in several target-language-only classrooms), I imagine my brain churning over, looking for whatever "mistake" I made that prompted this barrage of questions.  If I was a schoolkid, I'd maybe even start blushing, wondering if I'd picked the socially unacceptable option, and the embarassment would snowball.

At 3'45" one of the student asks for confirmation of -a vs -o in adjectival endings, and the teacher tells him that's not how the class works.  This is the usual insistence that in an immersive environment, grammar is not "taught", students just "acquire" it; but if we look at it, the teacher is explicitly highlighting the change of vowel.  She is, whether she likes it or not, presenting the rule, and anyone who actually learns from her laboured routine of pointing and saying will be able to explain the rule.  So if the student works it out, what's wrong with confirming? In fact, at 4'35", the student in background explains the rule, and the teacher says not to talk about it.  It's difficult for me to accept that conscious knowledge of the rules could be so caustic that it has to be avoided at all costs when she is going to such lengths to give the rule in a roundabout way.


The other thing that this lesson demonstrates is the difficulty of relying on memory.  At one point she asks the colour of someone's shoes.  Does this test comprehension or does it test memory?  It will never be clear whether a student's inability to respond comes from not remembering the fact under test or from not remembering the correct term.  If you're asking someone to remember something, it needs to be something memorable, and colours (the first video used colours too) are minor aesthetic details - they are not usually what you pay attention to in stories, and making them more important than they naturally are will interfere with the learner's ability to process the language in a natural manner.


Now note this curiosity from the same demonstration:

We're getting back into classroomese again -- teaching an unusual mini-sign-language for students to use as a way of avoiding native language in the classroom.  No matter how simple the code, introducing a sign language means the classroom is not monolingual, yet they insist that this is monolingual teaching.

Now the following example story, stripped back to just the "story" itself, struck me as rather surreal.

Is this really a "story"...?
Anyway, while it's obvious what language it's supposed to demonstrate (liking, wanting), it's not really clear whether it's going to be teaching anything more than the words "llama" and "elefante".

It's quite striking that of all the videos I've watched on TPRS, none demonstrates how to introduce new abstract language or structures.  As with most target-language-only learning, in TPRS there seems to be a massive emphasis on concrete vocabulary.

And sadly, as I've said before, vocabulary is the easy bit.  I don't have a great deal of time for any language teacher who does the easy stuff and avoids the hard stuff.  The easy stuff we can do without their help.  What I want from a teacher is for them to take the hard stuff and make it easy for me.

TPRS has it's place - I can see a well-constructed story offering a great change from the usual lesson format, but trying to build an entire course out of it just seems like madness, because for all its strengths, you still need something else to address the weaknesses I identified above.

The 3 sources of confusion in vocabulary.

There are various pieces of advice on the internet regarding how to learn vocabulary, but most writers set out to write their advice with the goal of convincing you that their way is best.  This means that they skip the weaknesses in their chosen method, and they attack other methods on rather simplistic, superficial grounds.  I would be happy to do the same thing, as it would really stoke my ego to know that people were doing stuff because I said so.  But that wouldn't be particularly useful, so I'm going to try to avoid telling you how to learn vocabulary.

Instead, what I want to do is arm you to make an informed decision on techniques yourself.  It's a topic I may revisit later, but for now I want to focus on the reasons vocabulary items become confused.  As per the title, I break confusion down into three main categories: confusion by form; confusion by function and confusion by co-occurrence.

Confusion by form
Confusion by form is the simplest.  If two words sound and/or look alike, they are very easy to confuse.  English is full of great examples -- classic spelling mistakes between homophones such as "bough" and "[take a] bow", "aloud" and "allowed" etc.  Most languages aren't quite as bad as English for having homophones that are written differently, so the confusion is normally between similar words, not identical ones.

But there's more to it than that.  Have you ever been trying to think of a word and you've got a sort of shadow of the word in your head?  The features of words that are easiest to remember are the first syllable and the number of syllables, as well as which syllable is stressed.  So similarity doesn't rely on just having similar letters all the way through -- it can occur on just the first syllable, or the words may both share a particular rhythm.

We can consider so-called "false friends" as simply a special case of confusion by form, as the only difference is that the confusion occurs across languages, rather than within a language.


Confusion by function
Confusion by function can be split into two subcategories: function of grammar and function of concept.

Confusion by function of grammar is fairly simple but has extremely absurd results.  Some people can't believe it exists, but keep your ears open and you will hear it at some point.  A word gets dropped in that fits the grammatical category of the place it is in the sentence, but it makes no sense.  Anecdotally, I'd say that I've seen it occur mostly with verbs.  So for example someone might say "I like drinking books".  It's rare, but it happens.

Confusion by function of concept is where two words mean something similar.  The obvious example would have to be that high school language class favourites: pets.  I could never remember whether un cobaye was French for a gerbil or a hamster, and still don't.  I don't suppose I would have recognised the difference between the two animals anyway, so the concepts in my brain were very similar: little fluffy critter.

But the two types of confusion by function can combine to create even bigger confusion.  While we do occassionally see completely nonsensical statements like the "drinking books" example, learners will quite often substitute a verb with a similar meaning.  So instead of saying "I didn't say anything" they might say "I didn't speak anything", of instead of saying "open the door" they might say "close the door", or even "close the window" (I had massive problems getting my open and close and door and window right in Welsh).

Confusion by co-occurrence
Finally we come to the one that is the most complicated and troublesome: confusion by co-occurrence.  Basically, the brain likes to associate things with each other.  We have salt and pepper and we have bread and butter, but we never have pepper and salt or butter and bread.  When things appear with each other a lot, they start to stick.  So when we're learning vocabulary, we can accidentally trick our brains into linking particular words more strongly than it should simply by having them appear next to each other a lot.  This is one of the biggest risks with word lists -- in a list, each word is forced to co-occur with the rest of the words on the list, particularly those directly before and after.  Reading the same list multiple times is almost guaranteed to create confusion by co-occurrence.

Multidimensional confusion
I've already demostrated how the two types of confusion by function combine to make a bigger problem, and of course all different forms of confusion can combine in this way.

I used to confuse my oats and my hazelnuts in Spanish.  Both are food and go together in my breakfast bowl for a sort of home-made muesli (confusion by function of concept).  They were stocked less than a metre apart in the local supermarket and I kept them next to each other in my kitchen cupboard (confusion by co-occurrence).  Oats is "avena" and hazelnuts are "avellanas" (confusion by form). Even when I came back to Scotland, I still couldn't get the word right.  Ironically, it is only when I started using this example that I became able to make the distinction correctly.

Lessons to be learnt
A learning technique cannot eliminate the confusions completely, but it must try to minimise them.
When evaluating a vocabulary learning strategy, or devising your own, look out for the 3 types of confusion.  When you're learning, be mindful of your mistakes and what they tell you about how you're learning.  If you can't think of a word, or keep getting it wrong, the chances are it's down to one of these types of confusion, and you should be able to refine or alter your technique to help you remember that word correctly, which over time should help you avoid making the confusion with new vocabulary in the future.

One of the big arguments that comes up on the net is over the usefulness or otherwise of rote learning.  It is near universal that people who support "rote learning" don't actually know what rote learning is.  To them, "by rote" is synonymous with "by repetition".  If this were so, we would not have invented the word rote, and there would be no argument, as everyone knows that there is no learning without repetition.

What rote learning is is repetition without meaning.  Rote learning is when we memorise a list of dates, or the order of kings of France without any background.  Learning these meaningfully means looking for linkages and cause and effect.

The example I recently used elsewhere was the presidents of the USA, a subject that I don't really know much about.

Here's four of them:
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford

How did I remember these?

First of all, part of it is mnemonic.  If you look at the syllables, you have !.. !. !. ! (where ! is a stressed syllable and . is an unstressed one).  To me, there's a rhythm in there that's reminiscent of playground chants.  Are mnemonics rote?  To a point, maybe, but mnemonics aim to give artificial meaning to inherently meaningless data, so not strictly rote.  Besides, this is not the main way I learned the order, it's just an additional support.

First up, I looked at the order on the internet.  I looked for links.
The first thing I recalled was that I had seen TV archive footage of Nixon and Kennedy running against each other in the presidential elections.  Kennedy was shot, while Nixon resigned, but that doesn't tell me who was first.  The meaningful information that tells me Kennedy was first is the archive footage mentioned previously, but more specifically the accompanying analysis: it is said that it was TV that won the election for JFK, because he looked so much nicer.  Hearing that said over the top of pictures of Kennedy smiling and waving with Nixon hunched up and looking concerned sticks -- it really means something.

So Kennedy was before Nixon.  How do the other two fit in?

Well, that relies on knowing a little bit about the American terms of office.  If a president dies or steps down, he is replaced by his vice-president.  Nixon and Kennedy ran against each other, so there must have been another president between them, as Kennedy died.  And when Nixon resigned, his VP took over.

The names Johnson and Ford don't really mean much to me, and here's where the mnemonic chant helps, but if we look a little further we can make things more meaningful.

Johnson, as it turns out, was re-elected for a second term.  He won the largest majority of a US president in history.  Why?  Many commentators say it was a sympathy vote for JFK, as it wasn't really that long after the assassination.

Ford, on the other hand, was never re-elected.  Which isn't a surprise given that he took over from someone who resigned in disgrace.  To make matters worse, the economy was on a downturn at the time.

Filling in a picture of the most prominent features of these two gives me context -- meaning -- and looking at their photographs makes them people rather than facts.

I fully expect to be able to recall this right up until I start to go senile, because it now really does mean something to me.

Expository vs Naturalistic Language Examples

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing authentic materials.  The main problem I identified was the lack of mutual reinforcement between individual texts (I hate that word, but I just can't find a suitable alternative...) meaning that very little language presented is retained.

So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?

Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox.  Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts.  If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals.  The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.

The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour.  Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.

But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea.  In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.

But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?

The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.

There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.

To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".

Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach.  The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.

I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.

He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"

And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."

There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise.  We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.

I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.

An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago.  I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back.  The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition.  So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.

The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]

This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples.  Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural.  Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article.  "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets.  But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?"  The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal.  We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").

The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable."  Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar.  This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.

And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel.  When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response.  This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.

"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice.  Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap.  The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do.  The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong.  The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that."  Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you.  This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us).  The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost.  Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears.  Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses.  If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.

OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.

One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube.  He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language.  He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ.  Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out.  His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.

But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material?  Hmm....

Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ.  My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."

The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.

And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.

So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against.  The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.

One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue.  Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts.  Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog.  Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues.  Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.

The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language.  This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen.  I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen.  It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.

Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this?  Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability.  Except that Bernard is not a boy.  The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed.  Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there.  Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)

Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard.  Maybe they're introducing themselves to us?  Like a "piece to camera" in a video course?  It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna.  But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives.  Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)

Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!

This odd dynamic continues throughout the book.  The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains.  From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it.  Who exactly are they presenting information to?  They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,

So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet.  Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful.  Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.

But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen.  Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules.  One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible".  But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic.  Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible".  "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go.  Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:

If you think about it, what did he start with?

He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy.  Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input".  But it was not comprehensible.  Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.

So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language.  But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language.  The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.

In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem.  But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better.  It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation.  And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc.  These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course.  In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*

Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration.  Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept.  Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate.  Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language.  When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious.  If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".

So Jespersen is mostly wrong.  Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.

Word. New word. Different word.

One of the biggest problems facing many learners today is the problem of incidental vocabulary.  One of the prevailing themes in education is the preference for so-called "authentic materials".

"Authentics", to use a bit of teacherese, is just another word for "native materials".  Except you're allowed to doctor them a bit without making them less authentic.  Once you hit upper-intermediate, you will be subjected to more and more authentic materials.  Your lessons will be based around texts (that damn word again) drawn from newspapers, magazines and websites, or excerpted from novels or non-fiction books, and will be arranged in chapters based on themes like science and technology, arts, education and the like.

But there's suddenly a problem here.  Throwing together a heap of articles that are related in topic is all well and good if your goal is to study the topic, but if you are aiming to study the language, then the relationship between the articles is entirely superficial.  The structures that you are looking for just won't be there.

The simplest manifestation is in vocabulary.  Key vocabulary in that would be incidental for a native sends many a learner scuttling for his dictionary.  So a word appears once only in the article, and never again in the entire course -- that dictionary time is wasted as the learner does not learn the word.  In a textbook chapter on technology, you can switch from satellites to biometrics to textiles.  Each of these semantic domains has a vastly different stock of basic words.  The learner is left trudging through a bog of heavy, unknown words, and looking back later those are lost in a fog, never to be recalled.  A cursory look back may occur in a programmed "revision lesson", but it's a random sample of a fraction of the language covered, and usually limited to matching exercises (word+definition, sentence halves or question+answer) that tacitly admit that the student isn't capable of recalling the word without heavy prompting.

The same occurs with grammatical patterns, where a pattern may appear and be taught in one text, but then subsequent texts don't support, revise or otherwise consolidate that structure.  On the other hand, it's in the grammar that a lot of doctoring takes place, with complexity thrown out of window to make the text easier to understand.  But it is very difficult to program for increasing complexity when you're not writing the material yourself.

The end result is a lot of wasted time -- lots of material is presented to the learner, and little retained.  The goal of exposing the student to native materials slows down the learning process, and in effect means that students may leave the course less well equipped to deal with native materials than they otherwise would be.

But wait... there's more!
There is a secondary consequence of this.

The reliance on themed material favours the well educated, because they are more likely to have knowledge of the topic under discussion, and in many language pairs, the terminology will be very similar.  For example,  "biometrics" in French is "la biométrie".  This particular example came up in my last French course, and my classmates were confused by it, but as I already know a few things about biometrics, there was nothing in the articles themselves that challenged me.
The well educated and well read get better marks, and we justify this with by accepting that people who have done well in the past are "good students" and that those who haven't aren't.  This is only marginally better than the old fallacy of equating education and intelligence.
But in reality, whether the historically "good" students are genuinely better than those without a good history of attainment, that's a side issue.  The material presented favours those who really have the least need for favours.  In my book that's a bad thing.

It's particularly worrying to me that the course I was studying is with an institute of higher education that takes pride in the fact that it makes learning available to everyone, regardless of educational background.