I've been an ESL teacher since March 2008, so I'm now beginning my fourth year (really!? how did this happen!?) in this not-so-glamorous career. Not coincidentally, it's been four years since I graduated from Iowa State; I'm now working on my fifth. And in all the time that I've been in Linguistics and ESL, I've not really ever spent very much time studying second language acquisition. I mean, not really. I studied language documentation in college, and I had a weekend class in Virginia and another weekend training in Sam and Joan's apartment one hot summer in Wuhan. I tried a lot of different things while I was teaching in China and I've tried some different things with the families I tutor here in the US. And sometimes it works, and sometimes I'm rather unprepared. I mostly operate on my understand of how language works and equipping people to understand language, more than actually guiding them through any acquisition process.
And I have been, in all this time, fairly biased against Rosetta Stone. I have discouraged a great number of people from buying it, even though I have never (before today) used it. I believed Rosetta Stone was more Skinner-style Behaviorism, only cuter with its colorful pictures and voice-recognition software. But this last week, at work, I spent some time reading the Rosetta Stone manuals (and Rosetta Stone Manager manuals--which is actually, potentially a really cool tool...) and totally buying in to their "Dynamic Immersion (tm)" marketing scheme. I almost believed it, chided myself for being so judgmental, they do believe in natural language, so much so that they trademarked a phrase to describe it!
And then today, I had the opportunity to "enroll" myself as a student in Rosetta Stone. And I have decided it is, essentially, a really interactive, never-ending worksheet with no instructions. It is the best worksheet I have ever had the privilege of filling out. It talks to me, it has colorful pictures, it listens to me, it asks smart questions that guide my learning, and best of all, it tells me when I'm wrong. Immediate feedback is a pretty powerful tool when it comes to teaching. But it is, in the end, a worksheet. It gives a series of examples then asks a series of questions. Maybe it's not Behaviorism, but I can't imagine it's natural language acquisition.
I ordered a book by Stephen Krashen last week. Amazon tells me it will arrive between Mar 18 and April 4. I don't know much about Stephen Krashen, except that he used to teach at USC, and that a really smart lady I used to know studied with him and really believed him. And everything I know about ESL, I learned from her. I have a feeling that Stephen Krashen (back in 1981 when the book was published) will have a thing or two to say about Rosetta Stone.
It's not all bad news, though, guys. Language is hard to learn, as much as we wish that wasn't true. It takes a baby brain 2-4 years to start even figuring the the thing out. And our old, post-pubescent brains just aren't wired for these kinds of complex pattern-recognition problems. We, over time, learn to see what we've learned we need to see. So if we're going to learn language, we need things that will show us what we might not see, and Rosetta Stone will certainly do it better than moving to Italy or China and doing the non-trademarked version of "dynamic immersion". So I take it back. Go ahead and buy Rosetta Stone and use it and grow and learn. It's better than holding out for the yet-to-come perfect language learning program.
