by Lynch AKA The Regulator on March 11, 2012
Face the reality – the mathematical facts of the road to fluency
As mentioned above, the PQE helps the student to face the reality of what lies ahead. However, that’s not sufficient. You must make your students understand a few home truths. It’s not enough to say ‘you must study… classes aren’t sufficient’ you have to demonstrate it to them in a way that it’s anchored in their brain. You yourself as a teacher must also come to understand the absolute pointlessness of classes without a study programme.
Achieve both these goals by taking on board the following yourself and then communicating this to your students.
Total time to reach a basic level of fluency – 450 hours
Student has 2 * 1 ½ clases a week – total 3 hours a week
450 / 3 = 150 weeks + holiday breaks brings you to 3 years.
While this is a long time, many students would feel satisfied with this to a certain ex. However, there is one huge problem with this: IT DOESN’T TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE SIEVE FACTOR. WHICH IS namely, that almost as soon as you eneter some linguistic knowledge . and definitely if it’s half baked, it starts to slip away unless it’s constantly reinforced. This measn that the longer there are between classes, periods of study and the start – end date of your 450 hours the greater chance you begin forgetting what you learnt. In other words, people who learn over a short time can use the building block analogy. Each item they learn goes on top of the next to build a house of fluency. When you start elongating the learning time, however, it’s like a house of sand and the knowledge base starts dissolving away.
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by Lynch AKA The Regulator on March 11, 2012
The wrong PQE plan is one that would follow the Cambridge model without the necessary interlinking. The Cambridge model says that language consists of speaking, writing, reading, listening – therefore that’s what we have to teach them.
In actual fact, this approach could work fine if the material they were using was interlinked and allowed certain common phrases and vocab to be repeated … but it never is. The result is that students are soon put on a merryground of lots of different exercises wich haven’t been weaved together skillfully resulting in an information overload. Then, in a sincere effort to teach them the language teachers start throwing shit loads of grammar often spending no more than half a class on it and move onto the next theme.
This begins a cycle which you must be aware of to understand why so many students fail. It is a cycle of information overload that can be summarized in the following way…
Students are given loads of units to pass through. First they do unit 1 then they move onto unit 2 but they never truly assimilated what was in unit 1. This process then continues through all subsequent units. The result at the end is a whole suite of underdeveloped skills, words not memorized correctly and half assimilated grammar. The course has failed.
Every unit you do whether it’s grammar, vocab whatever, ask yourself the TAQ “did they assimilate that information.” And just for the record assimilate means.
That they can use the word, grammatical form etc.. without having to pause for a long time.
It is the common error of Information Overload that dictates and shapes what goes in the PQE. Basically, you must follow one simple guideline
– put in as little as possible.
It is better your students achieve total assimilation of a small number of language items that a mountain of wooly half baked words, forms and skills. You must therefore prioritiose and how to judge this priority is expounded in the next chapter.
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by Lynch AKA The Regulator on March 11, 2012
Don’t insist they learn every single grammar unit relevant to their unit. There are dozens of grammar units that seem terribly important but in fact their not – all they do is cause an information overload and enter students into the half-baked cycle above.
Who are you to say what’s important or not? How can you discount essential grammar?
First of all, you have to bear in mind that much of grammar is entirely arbitrary. In other words there are many coubtries around the globe where they have a different grammar. Watch the Wire and you’ll see in Baltimore expressions like “True that” “I don’t got nothing” in Jamaica ‘I is’ and the use of will in _ireland instead of would is technically incorrect.
What does this tell us? That some mistakes or mutations don’t matter so much. The goal of language is to communicate and as long as your message is communicated that’s what’s important. So then you have to ask yourself which elements are so fundamental you would lose all meaning. The answer is, the tenses. And we move minor grammar points into the vocabulary books. The tenses are what we ficus on because the ability to place an event in time is fundamental which means we have a motto. Nail the tenses nail the language.
Now, of course this is a slightly crude assessment but we use it to keep teachers and students focused on the important aspects of grammar. We consistently find that it is much more valuable for a student to have totally assimilated five or six of the principle tenses than half baked lots of different grammar units. It forms a coherent body of knowledge that allows them to communicate which is vital because.
1. Make it more likely they stick with the course because they’ve achieved tangible results they can see for themselves.
2. Make the rest of the language easier to learn. If you have a solid base the rest tends to fall into place.
These are the principles therefore behind our standard PQE at I-Ling.
Vocabulary – because language consists of words
The tenses – because language is governed by rules – the most important of which are the tenses.
Speaking – does that actually need articulation
Listening – ditto.
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by Lynch A.K.A 'The Regulator' on March 11, 2012
The status of materials is often downgraded. One of the main reasons is that language is a spoken phenomenon and text books seem artificial, formal and too rigid. They are all of those things but they are also something else: ABSOLOUTELY ESSENTIAL!
If you are in the country of the language you are trying to learn then you can disregard text books –but if you are in your own country you can not avoid them. You need them to assimilate grammatical forms, vocabulary, and as an impetus to speak and write.
An incredible 92% of students begin and end their course without the adequate materials. Trying to learn a language without all the materials is like trying to study medicine without an anatomy book.
Even if a conscientious school ensures that a student has all the materials then we run into another problem: insufficient reinforcement. Basically, most text books do not have enough exercises for you to learn the vocabulary or grammar point they’re trying to teach you. This is a major cause of students learning English for years but never making progress: students repeatedly only ‘half’ learn things – meaning they have to go back to them again and again.
You must do lots and lots of exercises to assimilate grammar and vocabulary and you must have the adequate materials! So please, if a student is about to start a language course then make sure he or she is prepared with…
1. A vocabulary Book (with a method for learning the words)
2. Listening exercises.
3. A grammar book (with lots of exercises.)
4. Reading material (so you can see language in context.)
5. Conversation manual.
Then talk about a coursebook or classroom activity book. Please understand something. Coursebooks are not designed to take students to fluency – they are designed to briefly go through key areas of language in an interesting and informative way, but they are not designed to consolidate, repeat and push a student through the arduous journey to fluency.
Stop allowing students to do courses without the necessary materials: it’s like taking someone on a skydiving course and chucking them out of a plane with no parachute. With one key difference – the fall from the plane is at least a quick death – a course without the materials is a slow inherently flawed winding lane to failure.
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