FREE thorough foreign language courses available from Foreign Service Institute

[Sara R]

(I mentioned this in another thread, but I think it's cool enough to deserve its own thread.)

 

http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/

 

These courses were developed by the government in the 40s and 50s for military personnel. They are now in the public domain. They contain book and audio!

 

I haven't used them (yet), but I watched a

. According to the reviewer, they contain lots and lots of grammar and drill, which is important for mastering a language. You have to know the structures automatically so the right words come out when you speak in a real setting. The drill is in a parts-to-whole format. Each little piece of the language is drilled separately, and then put together. The downsides, according to the reviewer, is that it is very dry. He also said that he had heard that the accent on the Korean program was not good. I just listened to a little of the German, and that accent sounded fine to me.

 

Even if this is dry on its own, I think it would be a great supplement to courses like Rosetta Stone, which are very weak on grammar and drill.

 

The reviewer, who has taught himself several languages, has reviews of other programs at this link. He also has tips on what he thinks makes a good language program. He divides up the programs into three different types, that work best for different types of language learners. He says the best courses were usually created in the 50s and 60s. Since then most courses have been dumbed down quite a lot. One simple way to judge a program is by looking at the glossary in the back. How many words are you expected to know at the conclusion of the program. You need roughly 3000 words to be functional in a language.

 

Edited to add:

 

These are also cool because of how many different languages are offered. Many of these I have never heard of:

Amharic

Arabic

Bulgarian

Cambodian

Cantonese

Chinese

Chinyanja

Finnish

French

German

Greek

Hausa

Hindi

Hebrew

Hungarian

Igbo

Italian

Kituba

Korean

Lao

Luganda

Moré

Portuguese

Romanian

Russian

Spanish

Sinhala

Swahili

Swedish

Thai

Turkish

Twi

Vietnamese

Yoruba

Edited March 10, 2009 by Sara R

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

I checked out the French one, of course ;-)

 

There's a high emphasis on training the ear to correct French sounds. Something that we rarely see anymore! I really did like what I saw, except for the reference book called Le Monde Francophone . It's not the student book, but a sort of reference book about French speaking countries. First, the data is old - but that's to be expected. But there are many many errors in that book, mostly on accented letters. I would not use such a book for a student.

 

I did not see similar errors in the actual student book.

[cathmom]

Ah, the old audiolingual method! It's severely frowned upon nowadays. That said, I'll be using the free Swedish one to work on my Swedish! Thanks for the link!

[Sara R]

"Audio lingual" method, huh? I think that must be how I learned German. I had an old fashioned German teacher who started teaching in the late 60s. He still used the same methods in the late 80s and early 90s when I was in high school. The text books didn't support those methods anymore, so he made his own dittos to supplement the text books. We drilled and drilled. It turned out to be a good thing. German grammar is complicated. If you had to remember all of the little grammatical details while trying to talk, without the help of earlier rote memorization, you wouldn't be able to spit anything out.

 

Do you have any information about how foreign language teaching has changed in the last 20 or so years? I know about different philosophies of math teaching, reading teaching, and grammar teaching. I know in general foreign language courses don't teach as much grammar and don't drill as much.

 

BTW, I listened to one of the introductory Chinese tapes while I was out on my walk today, for fun. There was a lot of repetition, so it was easy to get the details and remember it. The 30 minute tape I listened to only taught about 10 vocabulary words, in sentences: Who are you? Who is he? I am __. He is __. What is your surname? What is his surname? My surname is __. His surname is __. and the titles Mr. Mrs. Miss and Comrade. Each sentence was said. Then each word was said individually 3 times. Then you heard it again as part of the sentence. Then they introduced you to a different word in that sentence. You hear it individually, then in context. And so on. Because it moved so slowly, I didn't feel like I had to rewind in order to master it.

Edited March 11, 2009 by Sara R

[cathmom]

Fall 2007 I took a graduate class on "Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages." Tomorrow I will pull out my textbook and refresh my memory on just why this method is so bad LOL! My dh is sleeping right next to where the book is.

[cathmom]

From my textbook Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen:

 

In language teaching, the instructor as central figure has always been the norm. As the profession moved from grammar and text-translation methods to a more "oral" approach, the instructor-as-authority-and-expert was codified in a teaching method called Audiolingual Methodology, commonly referred to as ALM or audiolingualism. ALM was predicated on the marriage of behaviorist psychology and then-current structural linguistics. According to behaviorist psychology, all learning - verbal and nonverbal - takes place through the process of habit formation. Habits are formed through repetition, imitation, and reinforcement. In ALM, language habits were formed by memorizing dialogues and practicing sentence patterns, usually through drills that required learners to imitate and repeat what their instructors said. Second language acquisition (SLA) was seen to be the replacement of first langauge habits by second language habits. Under this framework for learning and teaching, the first language (L1) was seen to interfere with the acquisition of the second (L2); that is, the first language habits got in the way of acquiring the second language habits. Maximum care was thus taken not to allow learners to make errors, because errors were evidence of bad habits. During drills, a premium was placed on error-free repetition, with no attention paid to whether or not learners understood the meaning of what they were saying.

 

Developed at military schools (where one did not question authority), ALM's teaching materials explicitly cast the instructor as the drill leader...With ALM, students were typically given a model sentence. The instructor then provided the cue that students would substitute into the sentence; some substitutions required that the sentence be altered in various ways, while other substitutions did not. The students' role has been likened to that of a parrot, since their task was to perform the substitution...quickly and accurately...

 

What the ALM instructor did not usually provide was the opportunity for students to use the language in a meaningful or communicative way, one involving the exchange of messages. Nothing that happened in an ALM classroom could be construed as an exchange of information because output (the actual production of language) was severely restricted. In fact, many thought that students did not need to know what they were saying; they needed to know only that what they were saying was correct.

 

 

My father went to West Point and I have his German textbooks. This is exactly how he learned. He told me that after 2 years, he could understand what was being said, but could not converse at all.

 

OTOH, I think that, in moving away from this method, they kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater. There is definitely something to be said for having the sentences in your head, correctly conjugated and with the right endings, etc. I think there is a place for memorizing dialogues in language learning. But the author of this textbook goes to the other extreme, wanting every utterance from a student's mouth to be authentic communication.

Edited March 11, 2009 by cathmom

[Sara R]

Thanks for posting that. It sounds similar to the arguments against phonics drills and math facts drills. They set up rote memorization to be the opposite of independent thought. If you do only rote memorization and never move on from that, that wouldn't be good. But rote memorization early on frees up mental space for more complicated tasks down the road. Memorizing math facts quickly allows the learner to succeed in higher math. Memorizing phonics allows students to read difficult words with ease. And memorizing grammatical structures in a foreign language frees the student to be able to eventually communicate using difficult grammatical structures without worrying about the grammar.

[ElizabethB]

Thanks for posting that. It sounds similar to the arguments against phonics drills and math facts drills. They set up rote memorization to be the opposite of independent thought. If you do only rote memorization and never move on from that, that wouldn't be good. But rote memorization early on frees up mental space for more complicated tasks down the road. Memorizing math facts quickly allows the learner to succeed in higher math. Memorizing phonics allows students to read difficult words with ease. And memorizing grammatical structures in a foreign language frees the student to be able to eventually communicate using difficult grammatical structures without worrying about the grammar.

:iagree:

 

I also vote for rote! I'm a big fan of rote memorization in the early stages of learning, I've seen what happens when that is dropped, and it's not good.

 

I memorized several phrases by rote, they stood me in good stead. For German, they were the only things I can say that are grammatically correct! If I said a few stock phrases, I was often mistaken for a native German. If a made up a sentence on my own, there was always some kind of agreement error. I had learned Spanish before German and it took a full year of German before I realized I should be learning the case of each noun as I learned it--they were obvious by the endings in Spanish. The most common German nouns are running around in my head without knowledge of which case they are so I cannot conjugate them correctly.

[cathmom]

:iagree:

 

I had learned Spanish before German and it took a full year of German before I realized I should be learning the case of each noun as I learned it--they were obvious by the endings in Spanish. The most common German nouns are running around in my head without knowledge of which case they are so I cannot conjugate them correctly.

 

YIKES!

[Storm Bay]

Thanks for the link! We already have Rosetta Stone, but this could augment it. Or allow us to try another language. Of course, some things do change, so you you travel to that country don't be surprised if you're a bit outdated in certain things. For eg, when I was growing up, it was still polite to say "how do you do?" in formal settings, and no one says that anymore that I've seen, even in formal settings. But, overall, the bulk will be the same as it was 50-60 years ago.

[Friederike in Persia]

:iagree:

 

I also vote for rote! I'm a big fan of rote memorization in the early stages of learning, I've seen what happens when that is dropped, and it's not good.

 

I memorized several phrases by rote, they stood me in good stead. For German, they were the only things I can say that are grammatically correct! If I said a few stock phrases, I was often mistaken for a native German.

 

We got a 19 year old visitor 3 days ago and he's learned some Tajik phrases, with which he's really impressed the few people he's met so far. I always thought learning phrases was nonsense, but I have to say I'm impressed, too.:001_smile:

He seems to be a bright kid altogether though, picking up Homer and teaching it to dd! If only we could have more visitors like him!