I came across The Foreign Service Institute's Language Course site the other day.
Initially, I was really excited. It is a huge resource of language
courses and materials in a ton of different languages. For free!
Wonderful, right? Well, after perusing the site for a little while, I
was less excited—but there is also good news.
The Site
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| Example of a language course page |
The site itself is pretty bare-bones,
which for me, is a plus. There are no complications and no dorky
photos. Everything is relatively easy to find. You click on the
language you want to learn, and then you are brought to the options.
Many languages have several different courses. It looks like this site is trying to convert some of the old material into web-friendly
content, as well.
The Material
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| Example Dialog - in German and English with vocabulary |
Each course has a PDF student workbook
that you can download, and there are lots of audio clips that you can
listen to that go along with the book. Unfortunately, the material
comes from a pre-communicative era of Language Teaching, where the
main focus was on dialog repetition and drills (and since I wrote
against dialog repetition and drills in my Master's Thesis,
naturally, I can't support them now!). However, despite the
old-fashioned methodology base and the inauthentic language, this
website is still a valuable resource for language learners AND
language teachers.
The Pros and Cons
First, the positives: My favorite thing
about this site is that it contains a HUGE amount of language
learning resources (for a wide variety of languages) that are
completely free because they are in the public domain. There is a lot
of material that could be used to build vocabulary and to develop
listening skills. Also, even though the audio-lingual, drill-and-kill
methodology is old and has been shown to have many flaws, it once
helped people learn languages. It can't be all bad, I guess.
Next, the negatives: Since the material
was developed pre-1980s, the vocabulary used and topics covered are
pretty old. Pair that with the outdated methodology, and site starts
looking like a 1950's grammar. Also, as I mentioned before, the
dialogs don't represent authentic language use. Beyond all of these,
however, my LEAST favorite thing about this site is that there is no
English learning section (which is natural, since all the materials
were developed by the US Government to help English speakers learn
other languages).
How to best use this site as a
Language Learner
Take advantage of the vocabulary
practice. There are tons of new words that you could learn. It would
also be helpful to read/listen to the dialogs for comprehension and
language exposure. However, when you are doing this, realize that
this language is NOT representative of cultural norms or real
conversation. If you are learning English, you can the students book
for a reverse vocab list if you use the material that teachers your
native language.
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| Example Vocabulary List |
How to best use this site as a
Language Teacher
There are 2 major benefits of this
site: the vocab building and the accent training possibilities. For
Vocabulary, there is no lack of possibilities. In English courses
where the students have the same native language, you can use the
chapters for the reverse vocab lists I talked about in the student
section. Also, it is pretty easy to take the vocabulary lists and
create your own good content around the material. For accent
training, focused listening activities, where you point out
differences between student pronunciation and the speaker
pronunciation, could help with accent problems. You could assign
certain listening and speaking practices to individual students or to
the whole class. Other ideas for using this site as a teacher include
keeping the syllabus (grammar items, vocabulary) and redesigning the
activities to be more authentic. Also, you use the inauthentic
dialogues to point out differences in real conversation and to work
with the students to create natural, authentic-sounding dialogs.
In conclusion, if you are eager
to learn or willing to work, there is useful stuff on this site. Does
anyone have an experience using this site or other ideas to modify it
for the classroom?
