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Fluency on four skills with initial emphasis on listening and speaking.
Formative function: understanding culture through language.
Pros:
1. Useful language learnt from outset.
2. Good pronunciation achieved through sound discrimination and auditory practice.
3. Materials especially devised on contrastive analysis rather than total structures –presentation based on frequency counts and utility.
4. Reading and writing not neglected but postponed to serve as reinforcement.
5. Highly motivating: learner senses achievement from beginning through practical use and participation.
6. A-LM requires and encourages use of simple and mechanical aids.
Cons:
1. Lack of spontaneity if learning is overmechanical.
2. Reliance on inductive process dangerous.
3. Time lag between oral and written work: dependence on ear alone can lead to insecurity – emotional dislike of aural-oral work and invention of graphic equivalents.
4. A-LM for all students? Average student does best, intelligent student border?
5. Makes considerable demand on the teacher: preparation/drilling/imagination.
6. Is order of presentation natural?
7. Does A-LM produce language illiterates –fluent speakers who cannot read or write?
Possible remedies:
1. Avoid dull drills –contextualize: use variety.
2. Practice should be meaningful and point of drill should be explained to the learner and understood.
3. Time lag must vary according to situation – in some cases oral/written work side be side.
4. Intelligent students should be told that practice makes perfect – hence importance of fluency, clarity and precision.
5. Order of presentation probably logical though analogy with child learner not relevant. Adult is trained to think and use books/dictionaries, but without first learning how to pronounce words he will not learn how to read well.
6. Experience showed that A-LM trainer learner did better is all skills than traditional counterpart except in writing.
Though the emphases at the beginning are strongly on listening and speaking, no devaluation of literature is implied. It appears that mastery of sound system of a language is essential for efficient reading and for appreciation of literature. One of the qualities that makes a work of literature great is the choice of words and phrases, and one of the factors that governs this choice is how they sound. “To read a work of literature without any idea of what it sounded like to the writer is to be as handicapped as the tone-deaf listening to music or the colour-blind looking at a painting”.
Losanov’s Method or Suggestive Method
Few methods have been met with claims ranging from sensational to skeptical: mysterious and costly, a highly questionable new gimmick (one critic has unkindly called it “a package of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook”) and far remote from language teaching styles as language sleep learning, medative relaxation, electrical and sound impulses (E. Davydova).
Suggestopedia as G. Lozanov called his pedagogical application of :The Science of Suggestology” aims at neutralizing learning inibitions and de-suggesting false limitations that cultural norms impose on learning.
The suggestive method or Suggestopedia is a modification of direct method.The originator of this method believes, as does Silent Way's Caleb Gattegno, that language learning can occur at a much faster rate than what ordinarily transpires. In G. Losanov's view the reason for the pupils inefficiency is that they set up psychological barriers that block the way to learning. They fear that they will be unable to perform, that they will be limited in the ability to learn, and finally fail. One result is that the learners' full mental powers are not engaged. According to G. Losanov and his proponents, only five per cent of the learners' mental capacity is used. In order to make better use of the mental reserves the limitations, which they think we have, need to be "desuggested". Suggestopedia, the application of the study of suggestion to pedagogy, has been developed to help students eliminate the feeling that they cannot be successful and, thereby, to help them overcome the barriers to learning.
The behaviourist principles of G. Losanov's method assume theform of five maxims:
1. Get the learners to utter the same structure repeatedly.
2. Get them to do so correctly.
3. Do this through good grading of structures by arranging them in order of difficulty and by introducing them one at a time if possible.
4. The behaviourist approach is repetition and drilling to the point where the learner automatically makes the correct response.
5. Lessons must be designed so as to prevent the learners from making mistakes.
Behaviourist psychology described all learning (including language acquisition) as a matter of conditioning - as the formation of habits through responses to outside stimuli. Thus one learns a language through mimicry, memorisation and analogy .
Communication takes place on "two planes": on linguistic and psychological one. On the linguistic plane the message is encoded; and on the psychological are factors which influence the linguistic message. On the conscious plane, the learner attends to the language; on the subconscious plane, the music suggests that learning is easy and pleasant; when there is a unity between conscious and subconscious, learning is enhanced .
The class, where this method is used, is different from other classrooms - the students are seated in cushioned armchairs that are arranged in a semicircle facing the front of the room. The teacher is lively, dynamic, confidant, yet sensitive, and speaks only the target language, which suggests that the learners do the same. In the firsts three-hour meeting all learners choose a new name and nationality, after which they are given a fictional autobiography. By means of song, imitation, and play, the learners introduce themselves to each other and assume their new roles. Then over the next two days, the teacher twice presents a long script, each time with a different aim and a different learning set-up; these script performances called "concert sessions", are accompanied by music. In the first of these, the "active concert session", the music is emotional, and the tone of the artistic presentation reflects the character of the music. The learners have the script in two languages arranged in short phrases on opposite sides of the page. After the "concert session" come various kinds of elaboration activities, including group and choral reading of parts of the scripts, singing and playing games as a group and individually. The second day the script is performed again, this time in a "pseudopassive concert session” where a state of wakeful relaxation is artfully stimulated. This reading is accompanied by music of a different tone and mood, generally barouque style. Following that, the learners (in their new identities) are aided again in elaborating the script in various ways. This may include narrating a story or event, or creating an original story, using the language in the script .
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