@Magri Marcos: What do I do in my classes with students?.. Of course, I give some basic grammar, for example - the main verb tences in English, the system of declension in German or Russian. But in the focus I have never had grammar rules, but some topics.
I start with simple topics like - your family, your job(if I have adult students), your apartment, you hobby. I give some key-words to the topic, and then we start to make up some simple phrases. I try to encourage my students to form the phrases themselves only correcting them by the obvious mistakes. We can construct maybe 20 such sentences during the lesson, and the next lesson my students try to tell me (using such pattern phrases) about their families, apartments etc…
And mostly we have rather good interesting stories…
What about reading: it’s interesting, it enriches your vocabulary, and by reading you can understand better(gradually, of course) the structure of the target language.However, I would recomment reading after you know 1000 and more words; otherwise it can be a torture for you.
@Friedemann: “…one of my engineers here in China told me frankly that he does not like learning English at all but he knows it is important for his career, so he does it.”
Exactly as I said in my last post - if people really see an advantage or need, then they’ll do it.
(Otherwise they have to be driven by a strong passion or intellectual interest of some kind, IMO.)
People generally aren’t very good at doing things that they don’t want to do, but that they think are good for them. I think Steve’s repeated references to doing what you like doing is a pretty important thing, particularly for people who don’t have a lot of internal motivation. The more motivation you have, the more you can put up with activities that may be helpful, but not particularly fun or interesting. And the reverse is also true.
There is a fairly well-known saying in some languages: “appetite comes with eating”!
I think this can be very true of languages too: if a person goes through a tough “boot camp” in the initial stages of learning a language, he or she may then be all the more able to develop further by doing things which are fun and interesting.
(As a square-one beginner, it’s very hard to find any activity which is truly enjoyable to a learner, IMO.)
People studying English in companies are very rarely square-one beginners. They are usually university graduates with many years of formal schooling in English.
It’s true that it’s difficult to find truly enjoyable activities as a beginner, but then again, your progress can be so fast that that can be entertaining in and of itself. Many languages now have lots of reasonably interesting graded material which you can begin to access once you have a few hundred words under your belt.
Well, Bortrun, I still say that if folks have a really massive and pressing need for a language, then they’ll find a way to learn somehow or other. (However I absolutely agree that it’s always better to find interesting content inasmuch as this is possible.)
As regards beginner content: I’ve yet to find anything or anyone who does a better job of making the very early stages of learning interesting than Assimil. Their lessons come in small bite sized chunks, and they often make an attempt to be witty or funny from fairly early on.
(A while ago I got hold of the German edition of Assimil Turkish, and it looks absolutely magnificent!)
Yes, but it’s relatively rare to really be in a situation where you have a massive and pressing need to learn a language. Immigrants sometimes find themselves in that situation, but then again sometimes they don’t. People in companies would benefit if they improved their language abilities, but I don’t think that constitutes a massive and pressing need.
Keeping student interest is key in teaching a language, but the big question is the best way of doing that. Grammar-based instruction only captures the interest of about 4% of the students. That means 96% of language students don’t enjoy grammar and they find language acquisition difficult because of the emphasis on grammar. Acquiring a language through reading and listening grabs the interests of more students, as long as they enjoy reading to begin with and are interested in the material they are reading.
Over all, though, I think the most effective way to inspire long term interest in language learning with an emphasis on proficiency (actual practical use of the language) is to combine this idea of reading and listening with an interactive teaching method called TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), a method that grew out of James Asher’s and Stephen Krashen’s studies. With TPRS, the teacher and students create a story together. The teacher has 2-3 specific structures they want to teach (like “likes to eat” or “has to go”) and the students add details to those structures to make them into a story. As the teacher asks questions about those structures, it shows those structures in all their different ways of being used. For instance, the teacher could say, “What does Joey like to eat?” and the students could see how “likes to eat” functions in a question format. The students are more focused on building the story so they don’t realize that they are gaining the correct format for structures as the story grows. Using so many questions enables the teacher to repeat the structure many times (Krashen suggests 50-100 times for a structure to be acquired).
After building the story together, the teacher gives the students reading material that uses those same structures. This builds proficiency because instead of students speaking out of memorized rules they speak out of what sounds right (which is what children do when they learn their original language). TPRS stories are created about the students so it engages their interest. It’s an effective method because students are having so much fun that it doesn’t seem like work. While they might not speak in completely grammatically correct sentences, the students of this method are very understandable. They also feel successful and that motivates them to acquire more of the language. Susan Gross, an excellent TPRS teacher/presenter, says, “Nothing motivates like success.” The more successful students feel, the more motivated they are to do more with the language.
“It’s an effective method because students are having so much fun that it doesn’t seem like work.” The reason I like reading and listening!
@Bortrun: “…Yes, but it’s relatively rare to really be in a situation where you have a massive and pressing need to learn a language. Immigrants sometimes find themselves in that situation, but then again sometimes they don’t.”
Well, I find it quite difficult to see how any immigrant to North America (for example) could survive for very long, much less prosper, without having a basic functional fluency in English! :-0
“Well, I find it quite difficult to see how any immigrant to North America (for example) could survive for very long, much less prosper, without having a basic functional fluency in English! :-0”
There are in fact large pockets of immigrant communities in our cities where many of the inhabitants do not speak English. I live in one of these areas. There is a grocery store (and a decently large one at that) a few blocks from my house where if you don’t speak Spanish many of the employees can’t help you. Those who can speak English enable these people to live their lives solely in their native languages by providing the necessary services for them in Spanish, we have Spanish dentists and doctor’s offices, tax preparation services in Spanish, etc. Being bilingual in the US has created many job opportunities to service the niche market of those who don’t speak English. Unfortunately the increased government cost for having to provide all official documents and forms in multiple languages has become somewhat of a tax burden.
I know this is off-topic, but odiernod, would you prefer for English to be the official federal language so as not to have to deal with the tax burden of this increased cost of official documents being translated into different languages?
More government regulation never solves anything. Rather, a much better way to relieve the tax burden would be to eliminate the need for many of these forms in the first place.
Ok, thanks for answering. 
Odiernod says:
“More government regulation never solves anything. Rather, a much better way to relieve the tax burden would be to eliminate the need for many of these forms in the first place.”
Demonizing the government is of course the conservative mantra, repeating it doesn’t make it less false. There are many things in the US that desperately need regulation (the US needs a fuel tax like we have in Europe, the financial industry definitely needs more regulation) while other things are certainly overregulated like the US tax code (its complexity basically being a result of resourceful lobby groups bribing politicians).
I do agree though that having two official languages in the US is probably not a good idea.
Demonizing the free market is typical liberal mantra, and repeating it doesn’t make it any less false either. Explain to me why the US needs a fuel tax like Europe? Adding a fuel tax doesn’t solve any problems and raises the cost of living for the average person. Financial regulation, like that of forcing banks to give out risky loans to make them more accessible to the those who would never normally qualify, is the main reason for the housing bubble crisis. Yes, the tax code is over regulated, we need a flat tax.
The US needs a fuel tax to incentivize higher energy efficiency. Furthermore it needs a price floor under fuel and oil prices since future oil will be expensive to produce (80 to 100$/ barrel and up) and sudden price collapses can threaten supply in the longer run.
Lower fuel costs simply lead to more consumption. The US should stop whining about 4$ gas and become more energy efficient. Europeans pay 8$ gas and are therefore much more energy efficient than the US is.
You don’t think overleveraging in the financial industry was an issue? Pre crisis Deutsche Bank had profitability targets of more than 20% on their capital. You think you can meet those just by making home loans?
Along those same lines perhaps we should cut off food supplies to Africa to incentivize them to become more efficient calorie burners.
We should outlaw seat belts as well to incentivize people to become better drivers, and perhaps if we ban door locks that will incentivize us all to improve economic conditions to the point where no one needs to steal anymore…
Getting back to the topic at hand: I do not think there is a clear process to language learning. I am not sure how the original poster comes to that conclusion so easily. Learning is a very nuanced psychological process and simplying bowing to anecdotal reports from authority figures does not strike me as very scientific.
On the other hand, what is self-evident is that classroom teachers, as opposed to incidental teachers like Steve, are in demand, even though there is no evidence that they do any good. I think there is a psychological need for a paternal or maternal figure for embarking on any learning task, not only language. I guess lucky for me, since I am a relatively successful classroom teacher of 14 years.
ad dooo: I’m sure you can do some good as a classroom teacher and I guess that there is a good reason why people keep hiring you for your services. Personally, I very much like the idea of a “mentor”. Some of my former teachers (especially my Italian teacher in high school) managed to fulfil that function for me. I have to admit though that in doing so they were mostly acting in open opposition to the traditional teaching methods and in particular methods of evaluation (not threatening you with a bad grade for every mistake you made).
I think depending on your level of proficiency and your preferred personal learning style, a teacher (in my example the “mentor”) can be a great asset. Your students seem to benefit from your teaching style as well otherwise you would not have been successful for such a long period of time.