DialoguE and the Four Language Learning Thresholds
DialoguE Effectiveness
To allow a complete beginner, within two weeks, to communicate in a foreign language, or to inspire vast improvements in speaking levels for an advanced speaker; these are DialoguE’s achievements. Though of relatively recent origin, this method has become the reference standard for language learning. The reason: whatever the level, beginning or advanced, each student makes enormous progress in only a few days.
The Secret
While the DialoguE formula (1) may not reveal a genuine secret, what it does do is create, without rote repetition, the conditions in which students learned their own native languages. The method recreates the natural environment in which students learned their original languages and made them their own. Nevertheless, there is a difference between a child learning his or her first language and an adult attempting another, a barrier that must be breached else the second language will remain inaccessible. We deal here with both psychological and physiological barriers.
One learns to speak a language in several steps. What are the four most important and yet daunting thresholds a students faces? Jean-Claude Narcy, in his book “Learn a Foreign Language” (2), suggests the four thresholds: psychological, listening, cultural and linguistic. How do each of these challenges relate to the strategy DialoguE uses?
The Psychological Threshold
What the learner often lacks most is self-confidence: a freedom from fear of communicating in a foreign language, of making errors, of hitting blocks posed by teachers and other students. Krashen (3) calls this “the lowering of the affective filter” and it is in essence, to give it a title, a prioritizing of priorities. It is better to communicate bravely, even if one makes errors, than not to communicate at all.
How do we give learners this self confidence and steer them clear of defensive strategies that inhibit their learning process?
How to Instill Self-Confidence
In it essential to learn how the particular student best learns. Learning style depends on life-style, but also on interpersonal needs.
As Jung has discovered, people juggle four fundamental interpersonal needs: the needs for validation, acceptance, achievement and security.
Persona Technique training (4) lets the teacher quickly ascertain the fundamental need of the student, the unconscious objective the student himself, as much as the teacher, will seek to attain. In interpersonal relations, according to Charles Osgood, one reveals oneself as either dominant, or compliant, and, on the emotional level one is either expansive or reserved. It is believed, according to the table below, that the dominant expansive learner is primarily pushed by a need for validation (showing his own worth), the non-dominant expansive by the need to be accepted. The dominant reserved personality needs to reach a level of quick results, while the reserved non-dominant needs to reach a feeling of security (learn by the best method, be assured that the method is working and is covering all the important bases).
| Expansive | Reserved | |
| Dominant | APPRECIATION | REALIZATION |
| Consenting | ADMISSION | SECURITY |
By responding to the learner’s fundamental need the method avoids learner frustration. In cases where learners are given the opportunity to show that they have improved (appreciation), or are collaborating (admission), or are quickly getting through difficult tasks (realization), or seeing that they are covering all the steps (security), learners become quickly frustrated and de-motivated, regardless of their attitude toward the target language. The same result applies when the teacher misreads the learner’s needs, for example slowly covering step-by-step detail when the real need is for the student to show progress.
How to Motivate?
To lead a learner to progress, it is not enough to lower his “affective filter” and give him self-confidence; every good teacher knows he must motivate the learner. To the extent the teacher caters to the student’s fundamental need, he keeps the motivation alive. All teacher involvement should have as its goal the maintenance of motivation. Let’s look at the method of giving feedback the student and reducing tension and defensive mechanisms.
Feedback
Saying “bravo” to someone who needs appreciation, shaking the hand of a student who needs to be accepted, or telling him his contribution has value, congratulating the student who needs to see tangible progress, punctuating by an “it’s perfect” the performance of the person who needs security, are some of the ways a teacher can keep motivating the student. In contrast, it is not useful, even dangerous, to applaud a person whose goal in life is to show competence (need for security).
Reduce Tension
It is important to realize that some students need a bit of time before getting into the meat of the subject, while others prefer to jump right in. The reserved dominant does not need much in the way of preamble. If the non-dominant reserved needs a little time, so does the dominant expansive, though the non-dominant expansive needs the greatest time buffer before getting into the subject. The teacher must work patiently with the latter, or risk turning motivation off.
Defensive Positioning
To learn—the point is so obvious that it bears repeating—is to accept change, to de-structure so as to restructure. The process often generates a defensive stance on the part of the learner. The initial starting points for the learner in relation to a new language are—we cannot stress too much—critical. In every group one encounters four possible attitudinal combinations, depending on the student liking for or antipathy toward the target language combined with the level of self-confidence. We can summarize the tendencies in the following table:
| Psychological conditions | I like the target language | I can speak it |
| Very difficult | ||
| Difficult | ||
| Good | ||
| Very good |
If the teacher puts himself in the place of the student he can anticipate the blockages that may occur. If he in addition remains flexible enough to realize that the needs of the students are more important than his own, he creates, in responding to those needs, whatever the students’ needs or defensive mechanisms, a climate conducive to study, concentration, and emulation. Hence to be effective he has to know himself, following Socrates, but also know the others and modify his own personal style accordingly. The table below summarizes the points needed to avoid de-motivating the student and to be able to, on the contrary, keep the motivating going on a constant basis:
| Needs | Strong Points | Try to Save | Interested | Under Tension |
| Appreciation | Opening | Comfort | Originality | Angry |
| Admission | Tolerance | Harmony | Relations | Depressed |
| Realization | Authenticity | Time | Benefit | Concerned |
| Security | Reliability | Face | Data | Guilty |
Errors
We can also manage student error by knowing student approach. Few students enjoy making what are called “mistakes.” It is not possible to promulgate a concept of perfection in a language without opening up the risk, at any given moment, of committing an error. Rather the teacher uses a strategy that leads the student to make as few errors as possible. He does not dwell on faults, or push learners to do what they cannot accomplish, but rather works with them in promulgating a model before asking that they reproduce it. In a climate of real confidence, learners make fewer errors.
Thanks to the Persona approach, the Dialoge “empowerer” (a better term than “teacher”), uses his flexibility to adapt to all the students’ affective aspects (feelings, motivations, interests, attitudes, values) as much as to the language itself, to each person’s cognitive attitude and different way of using memory, to differing rhythms of teaching.
Lesson Support
Regardless of teacher and student style, successful motivation depends on effective lessons support.
Because of this, the DialoguE program stresses an individual approach. Many schools promise just this, but DialoguE delivers on the promise, structuring as a matter of course everything around the needs and goals of the student. Lesson thematic subject matter is always relevant to the student’s life, profession, range of interests, and the student ability to apply vocabulary in the real world. In fact, with the goal of motivating through empowering, DialoguE gives the student tasks to accomplish, objectives to attain. This is accomplished, usually, through the following means:
- The instructor finds base material, illustrating concrete points, that directly relate to the student’s objectives. It is not enough here to use material that may be pedagogically adequate, but rather “authentic” themes relating to the life and thoughts of the target country.
- At every point the learner goes through a process of discovering and appropriating the material.
- The student is encouraged to apply his or her new abilities in the language with simulations that are as close as possible to real life situations (theme, content, etc.).
- As much as possible, DialoguE adds expertise in subject matters relevant to student needs and prepares them to interact with native speakers other than their teachers.
It is only through task attainment and mission completion that the learner immerses himself in essential grammar and word use patterns. In distinction to many methods that claim the learner cannot learn to negotiate before a certain level, the DialoguE approach teaches the learner to negotiate and conduct vital communications from the first moments of instruction. DialoguE follows the tenet that a person can negotiate at any level of competence; for a beginning to say simply “yes” or “I agree” is certainly equivalent to an intermediate speaker saying the same thing in the form of “I’m thinking the same way as you” or an advanced speaker putting the thought in the form of “I share your point of view”.
With his back against the wall, faced with a task that must be accomplished, the learner will by necessity develop his or her own path to learning.
In putting the student into real-life situations, one stimulates the student, as much as possible, to be motivated; the student’s memory, be it visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, works at optimal strength.
We ought not to forget, however, following D. Thomières (5), “that spontaneity is learned slowly and through non-spontaneous means.” It is critical to put into place, in a systematized way, automatisms, which we discuss in detail in the section on the linguistic threshold.
Cultural Differences
A teacher who fails to take into account the cultural differences between himself and the learner risks creating damaging blockages for the student. All of us know there are certain taboo behaviors and subjects for given nationalities. It is not proper, for example, to ask a Chinese to speak about his health. It is not wise to insult an African by pointing out to other that he has not mastered the material he was supposed to study and review. It is also important to realize that for him to express such thoughts is fundamentally contrary to the values he was given by his parents and their tradition. Certainly, if the teaching milieu is one of real confidence, the learner will be less disturbed by these subjects or behaviors, but we know, at the cultural level, that it is best to act in a way that obviates the need to bring up these issues.
The Listening Threshold
Another possible area of concern for the learner is the level at which he understands messages transmitted in the target language. The human ear and level of consciousness is, on a physiological level, the same all over the world. Unfortunately, adults do not all hear the same sounds, because the native language puts auditory filters in the way. The French “u” sound (y) (6) sounds to an American ear as an “ou” (u). The ear cannot tell the difference between an open French “e” and a closed French “e,” etc.
Non-comprehension or partial comprehension of what the other person is saying is one of the major obstacles to communication. And insofar as the voice cannot form what the ear cannot hear (7), it is necessary to break through the listening barrier to be understood and (a point often lost) to be able to continue with the language but without the teacher. What strategy must be used to give the learner an “ear,” to allow him to understand native speakers and be understood by them?
1. Sound, Ear Preparation
There are certainly “sound machines” but, added to the fact that they are psychologically unpleasant to use, they demand great levels of patience and fortitude. So many students, disappointed at their previous experience, have called DialoguE in order to have a greater human touch, one that validates them and gives them effective learning levels.
All DialoguE training starts with an education, or rather a re-education, of the ear. What use is it to repeat and ask the student to memorize words and expressions he cannot understand? Starting with ear education gains precious time and avoids common frustrations. If any time in the course of the training the need seems critical, a good deal of the instruction is dedicated to this format.
How does the DialoguE approach educate the ear? By presenting language sounds, by exercising auditory discrimination, and message decoding.
- Presenting the Vocal Trapezoid and the Consonants
Since most of the time the student has no familiarity with the international phonetic alphabet, we give him the vowels—and this supports the natural approach—that he will encounter most often in reading, but in the form of a vocal triangle or trapezoid figure. This technique gives the learner a clear idea of what needs to happen in the vocal organs to produce a given vowel. ; in French, for example, the “a” produced at the bottom of the mouth is the most open sound, as much as the " i,” “u” and “ou,” pronounced at the front of the mouth, are the strongest vowels. As to consonants, we also show them in the form of oppositions (occlusives/constrictives, tensed/not tensed, etc.).
The pronunciation of each sound allows a “radioscopy” to occur in the ear, letting the learner detect the sounds he does not know, to detect the filters extant in the mother tongue. “The larynx, let’s remember, only emits harmonics the ear can hear.” (8) It is hence rather easy, in asking the learner to repeat the sounds, to isolate those he does not truly hear. If in doubt, an auditory discrimination test may be useful.
- Exercises in Auditory Discrimination
To make sure that the learner hears certain sounds and in order to train his ear to re-hear all of the frequencies needed (in expression and comprehension), the DialoguE trainer often employs auditory discrimination exercises. Thanks to this comparison technique, using opposition of sounds, the learner comes rapidly to differentiate sounds he earlier confused.
- Decoding Messages
The next step to better auditory comprehension involves decoding messages. This can be done on a global level, but also—and here DialoguE is unique—on a word for word basis. It is worth noting that many learners who do not yet have the ability to hear all the sounds expend enormous energy trying to compensate, to guess, with both good and bad results, the content of the message.
As Krashen (9) suggests, DialoguE sends messages whose content is slightly above the learner’s performance level (n+1). DialoguEs originality lies in putting into place a technique of discrimination that replaces bare sounds with their “sound context.” It is one thing for a learner to detect each sound of the target language; real difficulties arise when attempting to catch these same sounds in a message, in a natural environment composed of many sounds. Thanks to the technique (10), DialoguE guides the learner toward a state of “transparency” in hearing the message.
Working on the messages as reformulations also helps comprehension significantly. The act of learning the language in the country contributes to better comprehension from the moment—we insist—that the ear is ready, is changed. All DialoguE training, wherever situated, recreates these ideal learning conditions, all at once, to improve comprehension, enhance expression, and break through the cultural threshold.