People who know me from sites such as HTLAL will know there's no love lost between me and Benny Lewis. The man always refuses to discuss anything, and takes mortal offence at anyone who doesn't agree unquestioning with every single word he says.
This is a shame, because Benny has a wealth of experience in language learning, and being able to "mine" this experience would surely reveal a lot of good stuff. Sadly, though, Benny's refusal to engage in any critical analysis of his own performance has led him to maintain a blog that is full of positively charged platitudes and little of practical substance.
Years ago, I borrowed a copy of his "Language Hacking Guide" from a friend, and blitzed through it making notes for a review on this site, but in the end I decided to let it slide and never published anything.
Now, though, the guy has another book out, entitled Fluent in 3 Months and published by no less than Harper Collins, and the press seems to be lapping it up.
Has Benny grown a clue recently? Has he stopped and given any serious thought to the language learning process? The writing on his blog is as devoid of content as ever, so I doubt it.
I'm hoping to get a loan of a copy of the book in a few weeks time to do my own review, but for now, you can read a very thorough review of the book by the user Big_Dog on the Polydog forum (accompanied by much discussion).
I have to say, most of what he says strikes a chord with me as typical of Benny's style. Woolly definitions, constantly moving goalposts, contradictions, overinterpretations, and just often downright wrong.
Does Benny say anything useful? Yes, he does, but then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
23 June 2014
11 June 2011
Link drop: English Next by David Graddol
In 2006 the British Council released a book called English Next by leading academic David Graddol, discussing the future of English as a global language. You can download it free as PDF from the British Council website, and I'll be putting it on my little ebook reader for a leisurely read at a later date.
I'm not sure I'll agree with it, though. While I agree that the English used in business meetings the world over isn't quite the language I speak, it's still not standardised, and it's pretty hard to imagine it ever becoming standardised with such a disparate discourse community. Popular culture will probably still mostly be filtered through one of the major native-speaking populations (mostly Hollywood), and we're always going to need some model to teach to...
In 2006 the British Council released a book called English Next by leading academic David Graddol, discussing the future of English as a global language. You can download it free as PDF from the British Council website, and I'll be putting it on my little ebook reader for a leisurely read at a later date.
I'm not sure I'll agree with it, though. While I agree that the English used in business meetings the world over isn't quite the language I speak, it's still not standardised, and it's pretty hard to imagine it ever becoming standardised with such a disparate discourse community. Popular culture will probably still mostly be filtered through one of the major native-speaking populations (mostly Hollywood), and we're always going to need some model to teach to...
07 January 2011
The myth of the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Generation
I've been on YouTube a bit today doing a bit of research into future articles, and on one video I watched, Steve Kaufmann commented on the idea that has been doing the rounds that attention spans are shorter than ever. I grew up in the "MTV Generation", allegedly, and the "SMS and Twitter Generation" is apparently even worse than mine. Let's combine the two into the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Generation -- the ADHG.
This is belief pervades much of modern thinking. For at least a dozen years, TV companies have been trying behind the scenes to devise ways of writing bite-sized TV programs for the ADHG. The conversation has switched from ideas of "webisodes" (the BBC experimented with this for two Flash-animated Doctor Who stories at the turn of the century, for example) to talk of TV programs for the mobile phone.
But this is nonsense. Cinemas may no longer show 4 hour epics, but aside from that, run lengths in most media have stayed stable.
A great example is the Star Trek series, simply because it has been running so long.
Looking at the details on Wikipedia and IMDB, you can see that in 1966 the original stories with Captain Kirk ran at 50 minutes each. The Next Generation, 1987-1994, was 45 minutes long, but this was mostly down to the increase in advert breaks, and the effective time taken to watch an episode would have remained the same. Deep Space Nine from 1993-1999 was exactly the same, as was Voyager (1995-2001) and finally Enterprise (2001-2005) was a mere minute shorter, which again we can put down to increasing advertising time. So over half a century, no more than 6 minutes of storytelling time has been lost, and the viewers are sat in front of the goggle-box for the same amount of time as before.
Now, what came out of the "webisode" model? Aside from the Doctor Who serieses already mentioned, the big one would be Sanctuary done with full CG sets. There were initially 8 episodes at 15-20 minutes each... but eventually they switched to a 42 minute television format, because that was more popular. So where's the evidence for reduced attention spans?
OK, yes, there's now 8 minutes less story time than a 1966 major drama, but that 8 minutes is 8 minutes more advertising -- that's 18 minutes of advertising to 42 minutes of viewing. Almost a third of your time in front of the TV is not following the story. To me that suggests a longer attention span, not a shorter one, but hey....
Anyway, this is a language blog, right? and Kaufmann was talking about how this mythological short attention span leads to daft ideas like 140-character Twitter messages for language learning.
Indeed, there is a massive amount of material out there for the ADHG. Radio Lingua's Coffee Break series, for example, consists of "podcast" courses of 80 lessons of 15-20 minutes. Of course, there's a lot of wasted time due to the faux-radio culture of podcasts. There's an announcement, followed by a theme song followed by a "welcome to the show", a short jingle, and finally the lesson starts after a full minute and a half (10% into the recording). And of course each episode ends with a goodbye, a jingle, and then an advert for the site (just in case you got it somewhere else). If quarter of an hour is too much for you, the same site offers a One Minute series. The invasiveness of the jingles, welcome, goodbye and site advert at the end is even worse, as each one-minute lesson is wrapped up in an MP3 of 3 minutes or thereabouts.
With so little time, something has to give. The One Minute series suffers from an acute lack of revision. As far as I'm concerned, if there's no revision, there's no teaching. What you're left with is a phrasebook, not a course. Coffee Break does retread some ground, but they do fall into the old trap of telling you to relisten to old lessons instead of programming in sufficient revision in future lessons. (Older LP, cassette or CD-based courses had to balance the cost of the additional recording media with the value of programmed revision, but a podcast class has no such excuse!)
And it's not just audio media that suffer for this perceived lack of attentiveness -- books are changed by the same philosophy. Everything's broken down and segmented into semi-self-contained units and sub-units, which means not exploiting connections. I was working with high-school kids using a book that introduced any new structure in the positive and worked on that, then in the negative and worked on that, then in the interrogative... But you know what? The rules for forming negatives and interrogatives in English are almost entirely regular, so these shouldn't need to be taught individually for every new strucure. But we have to keep things short -- it's the ADHG, don't you know.
But here comes the non-sequitur. At the same time as lamenting the lack of attention spans in "kids today", the course books exacerbate the problem. In the process of trying to make the material relevant to kids, they ignore the appropriacy of the format. Kids love magazines, right? So let's make our books more like magazines! Long before I took my sabbatical as a teacher, I'd read about this. Magazines are designed as much not to be read as to be read. You flick backwards and forwards, you glance at pictures, you read little lists of facts that distract you from the main article -- everything you don't want in a classroom.
Many school books actually undermine the learners' attention spans. So maybe the ADHG isn't a myth, but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is belief pervades much of modern thinking. For at least a dozen years, TV companies have been trying behind the scenes to devise ways of writing bite-sized TV programs for the ADHG. The conversation has switched from ideas of "webisodes" (the BBC experimented with this for two Flash-animated Doctor Who stories at the turn of the century, for example) to talk of TV programs for the mobile phone.
But this is nonsense. Cinemas may no longer show 4 hour epics, but aside from that, run lengths in most media have stayed stable.
A great example is the Star Trek series, simply because it has been running so long.
Looking at the details on Wikipedia and IMDB, you can see that in 1966 the original stories with Captain Kirk ran at 50 minutes each. The Next Generation, 1987-1994, was 45 minutes long, but this was mostly down to the increase in advert breaks, and the effective time taken to watch an episode would have remained the same. Deep Space Nine from 1993-1999 was exactly the same, as was Voyager (1995-2001) and finally Enterprise (2001-2005) was a mere minute shorter, which again we can put down to increasing advertising time. So over half a century, no more than 6 minutes of storytelling time has been lost, and the viewers are sat in front of the goggle-box for the same amount of time as before.
Now, what came out of the "webisode" model? Aside from the Doctor Who serieses already mentioned, the big one would be Sanctuary done with full CG sets. There were initially 8 episodes at 15-20 minutes each... but eventually they switched to a 42 minute television format, because that was more popular. So where's the evidence for reduced attention spans?
OK, yes, there's now 8 minutes less story time than a 1966 major drama, but that 8 minutes is 8 minutes more advertising -- that's 18 minutes of advertising to 42 minutes of viewing. Almost a third of your time in front of the TV is not following the story. To me that suggests a longer attention span, not a shorter one, but hey....
Anyway, this is a language blog, right? and Kaufmann was talking about how this mythological short attention span leads to daft ideas like 140-character Twitter messages for language learning.
Indeed, there is a massive amount of material out there for the ADHG. Radio Lingua's Coffee Break series, for example, consists of "podcast" courses of 80 lessons of 15-20 minutes. Of course, there's a lot of wasted time due to the faux-radio culture of podcasts. There's an announcement, followed by a theme song followed by a "welcome to the show", a short jingle, and finally the lesson starts after a full minute and a half (10% into the recording). And of course each episode ends with a goodbye, a jingle, and then an advert for the site (just in case you got it somewhere else). If quarter of an hour is too much for you, the same site offers a One Minute series. The invasiveness of the jingles, welcome, goodbye and site advert at the end is even worse, as each one-minute lesson is wrapped up in an MP3 of 3 minutes or thereabouts.
With so little time, something has to give. The One Minute series suffers from an acute lack of revision. As far as I'm concerned, if there's no revision, there's no teaching. What you're left with is a phrasebook, not a course. Coffee Break does retread some ground, but they do fall into the old trap of telling you to relisten to old lessons instead of programming in sufficient revision in future lessons. (Older LP, cassette or CD-based courses had to balance the cost of the additional recording media with the value of programmed revision, but a podcast class has no such excuse!)
And it's not just audio media that suffer for this perceived lack of attentiveness -- books are changed by the same philosophy. Everything's broken down and segmented into semi-self-contained units and sub-units, which means not exploiting connections. I was working with high-school kids using a book that introduced any new structure in the positive and worked on that, then in the negative and worked on that, then in the interrogative... But you know what? The rules for forming negatives and interrogatives in English are almost entirely regular, so these shouldn't need to be taught individually for every new strucure. But we have to keep things short -- it's the ADHG, don't you know.
But here comes the non-sequitur. At the same time as lamenting the lack of attention spans in "kids today", the course books exacerbate the problem. In the process of trying to make the material relevant to kids, they ignore the appropriacy of the format. Kids love magazines, right? So let's make our books more like magazines! Long before I took my sabbatical as a teacher, I'd read about this. Magazines are designed as much not to be read as to be read. You flick backwards and forwards, you glance at pictures, you read little lists of facts that distract you from the main article -- everything you don't want in a classroom.
Many school books actually undermine the learners' attention spans. So maybe the ADHG isn't a myth, but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy.
24 December 2010
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.
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.
12 November 2010
I was down in London with work, and I had a spare half-an-hour on my way to the airport. I was just about to head down into King's Cross-St Pancras underground when I remembered a bookshop I'd been meaning to visit.
LCL International Booksellers is on Judd St, under five minutes' walk from Kings Cross. I walked in the door and was immediately asked if I needed help. I didn't, so I told the shopkeepeer that I'd heard about the place and just had to see it for myself.
It was incredible. Every nook and cranny was jammed with a bookcase and every bookcase was full. There was every language course you could think of (except Rosetta Stone, which I think says something!) plus many you would never have realised existed, and many that don't exist any more.
I could bankrupt myself in a place like that. What particularly intrigued me were all the CDROM courses on offer. Now I know they'll all be rubbish -- all computer-based self-teaching packages are, but I'm just so curious about different people's ideas on how to teach languages with computers. What ideas were lost when Transparent Language and Rosetta Stone absorbed the market? What ideas did newer entrants to the market build on?
But in the end, there's no guarantee that I could get any of these older packages to run on a current computer, so I headed back to the "proper" book section.
So yeah, I did spend a bit of cash, but I only baught two books! (This is the first time I've ever been glad of draconian hand-baggage limitations on aeroplanes.)
This first is something I've been meaning to get for a long time -- Cronómetro. It's a book for preparing for the Spanish DELE exams, and I picked up the advanced version. I don't really put all that much stock in exams, but unfortunately the Open University recently aligned their marking scheme to the CEFR, and their final Spanish course is graded as B2/C1. Now that I've got an official rating against the CEFR, I feel compelled to better it -- my ego doesn't like not reaching the highest point. Also, I've found that various among the finer points of Spanish grammar are starting to slip away from me, so I really need to focus myself on something to get a better command of all those bits and pieces.
(I'm actually not a fan of the CEFR and I've got a couple of posts in the pipeline about the whys and wherefores, so I'll not bore you with that now.)
The second book was something a little different. It was Hippocrene Books' Beginner's Basque by Win Jansen. I really shouldn't have bothered -- I knew that at the time -- but my judgement was impaired by a cracking occular migraine that was constantly threatening to turn the world into shards of coloured glass like you'd find in a kaleidoscope. Talking to a shopkeeper whose head is trying to turn into a fountain of rhomboids is more than a little disorientating. (Crossing the road later was very disturbing, and walking through the tube station with a bloke from a stained glass window pacing me in my peripheral vision was also extremely bizarre.) This book has kind of inspired me to another post on one of the big problems with dialogues in language books, but that'll come later.
Right now, I'm more interested in the place of bookshops in the modern world. There is no specialist language bookshop in Edinburgh as far as I know, and I'm sure enough people know I would be interested that someone would have told me by now. Many of the books in there just wouldn't get space in even the best-stocked Waterstones, so there is no way for most people to discover them.
But what about the internet, I here you cry? I'm not hopeful. Years ago, the big buzzword in internet economics was "the long tail". They said that the internet would be great for the little guy by making things always available and available everywhere. It does, but that doesn't mean that folk will buy it.
The results have been disheartening. The internet seems to be concentrating more and more consumer power into less and less products.
Part of the problem is the problem of too much choice, and lack of the expert shop assistant. How do you decide what to buy? You get what everyone else is getting.
And it gets worse, because in a bookshop, you don't open up a book and see an advert for a rival book, but when I went to Amazon the other day and had a look at a course from the Michel Thomas range, I saw the following blurb in an advert for a rival product: " Tried Michel Thomas? New Spanish & French Audio Courses from Collins ". Almost everywhere I look for information on language learning, I see adverts for Rosetta Stone (a package which is almost universally derided by serious language learners). Hell, they even had their own display in the airport departure lounge I was in that same day.
So what is the future for language learning materials? Will we see increased consolidation on the market leaders, or will there be greater diversification? And in the end, does it really matter?
LCL International Booksellers is on Judd St, under five minutes' walk from Kings Cross. I walked in the door and was immediately asked if I needed help. I didn't, so I told the shopkeepeer that I'd heard about the place and just had to see it for myself.
It was incredible. Every nook and cranny was jammed with a bookcase and every bookcase was full. There was every language course you could think of (except Rosetta Stone, which I think says something!) plus many you would never have realised existed, and many that don't exist any more.
I could bankrupt myself in a place like that. What particularly intrigued me were all the CDROM courses on offer. Now I know they'll all be rubbish -- all computer-based self-teaching packages are, but I'm just so curious about different people's ideas on how to teach languages with computers. What ideas were lost when Transparent Language and Rosetta Stone absorbed the market? What ideas did newer entrants to the market build on?
But in the end, there's no guarantee that I could get any of these older packages to run on a current computer, so I headed back to the "proper" book section.
So yeah, I did spend a bit of cash, but I only baught two books! (This is the first time I've ever been glad of draconian hand-baggage limitations on aeroplanes.)
This first is something I've been meaning to get for a long time -- Cronómetro. It's a book for preparing for the Spanish DELE exams, and I picked up the advanced version. I don't really put all that much stock in exams, but unfortunately the Open University recently aligned their marking scheme to the CEFR, and their final Spanish course is graded as B2/C1. Now that I've got an official rating against the CEFR, I feel compelled to better it -- my ego doesn't like not reaching the highest point. Also, I've found that various among the finer points of Spanish grammar are starting to slip away from me, so I really need to focus myself on something to get a better command of all those bits and pieces.
(I'm actually not a fan of the CEFR and I've got a couple of posts in the pipeline about the whys and wherefores, so I'll not bore you with that now.)
The second book was something a little different. It was Hippocrene Books' Beginner's Basque by Win Jansen. I really shouldn't have bothered -- I knew that at the time -- but my judgement was impaired by a cracking occular migraine that was constantly threatening to turn the world into shards of coloured glass like you'd find in a kaleidoscope. Talking to a shopkeeper whose head is trying to turn into a fountain of rhomboids is more than a little disorientating. (Crossing the road later was very disturbing, and walking through the tube station with a bloke from a stained glass window pacing me in my peripheral vision was also extremely bizarre.) This book has kind of inspired me to another post on one of the big problems with dialogues in language books, but that'll come later.
Right now, I'm more interested in the place of bookshops in the modern world. There is no specialist language bookshop in Edinburgh as far as I know, and I'm sure enough people know I would be interested that someone would have told me by now. Many of the books in there just wouldn't get space in even the best-stocked Waterstones, so there is no way for most people to discover them.
But what about the internet, I here you cry? I'm not hopeful. Years ago, the big buzzword in internet economics was "the long tail". They said that the internet would be great for the little guy by making things always available and available everywhere. It does, but that doesn't mean that folk will buy it.
The results have been disheartening. The internet seems to be concentrating more and more consumer power into less and less products.
Part of the problem is the problem of too much choice, and lack of the expert shop assistant. How do you decide what to buy? You get what everyone else is getting.
And it gets worse, because in a bookshop, you don't open up a book and see an advert for a rival book, but when I went to Amazon the other day and had a look at a course from the Michel Thomas range, I saw the following blurb in an advert for a rival product: " Tried Michel Thomas? New Spanish & French Audio Courses from Collins ". Almost everywhere I look for information on language learning, I see adverts for Rosetta Stone (a package which is almost universally derided by serious language learners). Hell, they even had their own display in the airport departure lounge I was in that same day.
So what is the future for language learning materials? Will we see increased consolidation on the market leaders, or will there be greater diversification? And in the end, does it really matter?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)