This is your language class, do not say anything.
Nick Chaplin and I met in Waterloo station as a direct result of my email relationship with Professor Stephen Krashen. Stephen and I had been discussing everything to do with learning and acquiring languages for some time via email and he thought I should find out more about the ALG method because he himself had just been to Bangkok to see it in action.
Here's the first extract of the interview:
The main principle that attracted him to it was the fact that students are discouraged from trying to speak Thai until they feel that they really want to and it just happens, even if that takes six months or more to occur. This he felt, backed up his theory of comprehensible input being paramount in the acquisition of language and that forced speech, as occurs in many if not most conventional language classes, can have a detrimental effect on acquisition and eventually on a learner's desire and ability to speak. David Long, the man running the ALG programme, goes further and says that conventional language programmes actually damage peoples' ability to master the speaking of a language.
I was interested in following up Stephen's lead and meeting Nick who had done the course and was happy to talk to me about it because on the surface it seemed to be the complete opposite of Out There. I subscribe to Stephen's theory of comprehensible input but I couldn't believe that it was bad for learners to try and speak the language they had been studying.
This is just the first part of the interview and Nick explains what his Thai was like when he started and how the lessons basically work. They do indeed sound very different to what most of us are used to. Two teachers in a class, neither formally trained to explain 'rules' and very little graded language.
As I listened to Nick and we chatted, and you will find this when I publish the rest of the interview, there are some very interesting and unexpected similarities between the ALG course and Out There. I have discussed these with Stephen and we seem to agree that what Out There does is almost remedial work on a psychologically supportive level with language learners who are nervous or afraid to speak, maybe even 'damaged', as David Long of ALG would advocate, by conventional methods of language teaching.
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