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    IATEFL tweet about speaking English methodology

    publication date: Apr 3, 2009
     | 
    author/source: Jason West
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    Extract from my recent email to a time-served ELT publishing professional, examiner and FLT author

    Re: methodologies, just picked this up via a tweet (!) from IATEFL, seems someone presented it... www.freeenglishnow.com  Would love to have seen peoples' faces at the conference. Can anyone who was there let me know how it was received?
     
    I've had a scan through, I think the ideas are interesting, and can see how the need to hear correct pronunciation of target language is important to being able to speak it.  I think our students get this from speaking to people using the target language, because if they cock it up the usual response once the fluent speaker twigs it, is that they repeat what the learner was just trying to say, and then the learner hears how it is said and then repeats it themselves upon which the fluent speaker provides affirmation by nodding and saying 'yes'.  I call this automatic self-correction.  It is like a teacher but without the baggage of being corrected because both people are just trying to communicate, so there is no real right or wrong in the conventional sense, just the need and desire to be understood.  Once the learner gets the pronunciation right (i.e. like training their brain/mouth to make the right movements and thus the right sounds to be understood) the buzz that Krashen was interested in, phenylethylamine, making them feel good, plus the unique person/place/smells/sounds/emotion are all linked to the language and the experience with the language and therefore give many more neurological 'markers' for future recall of not only the language but the sound and shape of the mouth.
     
    The materials on FreeEnglishNow are a tad dull though and I think, after a quick look and listen, a bit Callan, which is great for lower levels, but like you said in an earlier email re: xxxxxx method materials, limiting with regards vocab acquired whilst using them.  I looked at a level 10 lesson, quite dull. However, and this is where it probably scores highly, it will fit with the type of wrote instruction that a lot of nations still use in the English classroom and negates the need for the teacher to be able to speak English. So, clever. 

    But I still do honestly think our stuff is probably as effective, if not more so, but without the tedium ;-)  As you probably know, interaction and emotion and tanglible signs of understanding that convey progress = motivation. 

    But self-study without quality contact with L2 in a natural context or with a human face means that the level of internal motivation required by an individual to follow and finish a self-study language course is almost super human. 

    I think I was reliably told that something like 90% of Linguaphone boxes collect dust and never get finished or even make it out of the cellaphane.
     
    Interesting!  What do you think? Has science gone down well at IATEFL, I don't know, I was recording Arthur Scargill in Trafalgar Square!

     

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    Interesting that this cropped up at IATEFL. The science of forming the correct sounds when speaking and training the brain and the mouth to perform. I can see how it makes some sense and think what we do with real people has some elements of what they have done with recordings and transcripts.

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