As long-term HTLAL members will remember, me and Benny don't like each other. I have one thing to say about Benny personally, and this is it: most TY books are written by teachers with a decade or two of experience in teaching the language to large classes. This is not the case with Benny.
But I can put all that aside, because there's no way for me to know whether this is Benny's work or a ghost-written series with minimal input from him.
Now, as the books are not yet available, I will only be able to analyse what's publicly available so far: the annotated draft of lesson 1 of the French course at languagehacking.com, the second lesson of the four courses that can be viewed on Amazon (see Stefan's links above), and the “preview” PDFs that can be got from languagehacking.com (actually, they're stored on an open server on Amazon web services, but they don't publish the links because they want to get you signed up to their email list – typical marketing trick).
First observation: template teaching
My first impression of the course was that it was identical in all languages. On closer inspection, there are more differences than I saw at first glance, but still worryingly familiar. A normal TY book is planned out based on what works best for that particular language.
In fact, my impression is that the differences between language versions are essentially arbitrary – differences included simply to not be the same, rather than for any language-specific reasons.
Second observation: confused layout
Have a look at any of the sample pages (not the “preview” PDFs). What order are you supposed to read it in? While having “margin notes” looks helpful, the reality is that it can interfere with your ability to read the page, because normal reading doesn't involve choosing which part of the page to read and when. Should I read the notes before reading the dialogue? While reading it? After reading it? If people end up reading during the dialogue, it defeats the intended purpose of dialogues – language exposure in an unbroken natural(ish) setting.
This sort of thing is very common in “friendly” book serieses (see also “for dummies” and “complete idiot's guide”) but if information is important, it should be part of the sequence in the main text, and if it isn't, it shouldn't be there at all as it will distract attention from what is (or maybe included in an appendix for completeness).
This leads to one of those arbitrary differences I mentioned. On the webpage, on lesson 1 in French, “et toi?” is explained in a side note linked to the dialog, but in the preview PDFs for Italian and Spanish, the equivalent side note is linked to what I assume is an end-of-unit vocabulary list. I can think of no reason why the French version needs early explanation whereas the Italian and Spanish don't.
On closer inspection:
Poor proofreading
Now maybe this has been fixed in the actual book, but the Italian preview PDF has a pretty egregious typo in the third line of dialogue: “Dono Cesco” instead of “Sono Cesco”.
Incorrect use of terminology
The French lesson 1 on the website claims “cédille” refers to a letter, Ç, whereas it is actually the name for the accent mark under the letter. A minor quibble if this was a punky PDF ebook by a blogger, but not really acceptable from a professional book published by one of the UK's most well-known self-teaching brands.
Odd word choice
All three languages introduce a “so” in lesson 2. In Spanish, I'm pretty certain that the book uses the wrong one. The context is “so” in the sense of “anyway”/“moving on to a different topic...” not “in that case”/“consequently”/“as a result”, but as far as I'm aware, “así que” in Spanish is the latter, not the former. In the dialogue in question, I feel “pues” would be the appropriate translation (natives, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) and that “bueno” would also be appropriate in that position; but not “así que”.
Odd turn of phrase
“Creo que la música española es muy interesante.” (conversation 3) Literally “I think/believe that Spanish music is very interesting.” Now you could say this, and many people probably do, but do you really want to talk about your opinions this way? I mean “I believe it interests me, but I might be wrong”…? The Italian version is much more natural as an expression of opinion: “per me la musica italiana è molto interesante.”
What makes the Spanish one particularly troublesome is that it is the first use of “creo” in the book, and if the core meaning of “creo” is expressing uncertainty about a fact, the learner is being exposed to a less common, peripheral meaning before being exposed to the core meaning, which is not good.
Another odd turn of phrase in the same dialogue is the final line: “te gusta la música clásica o la música moderna?” (This line is also in the Italian version, but not the French or German.) It is not clear to me whether that is intended as a pick-one-of-two question (which would be very odd as the two options aren't mutually exclusive) or one-or-both-or-neither. But either way, I can't imagine ever asking it. Do you prefer, maybe; do you like, no. Clearly the idea is that they're trying to reinforce the “like” word already presented, but this forces it into an unnatural and unclear context.
Diving deeper:
Noticing (and failing to), context (and lack thereof)
In the lesson 1 sample on the website, as previously stated, there is a little margin note next to the dialogue to explain “et toi?” Now look at question 3 on the next page, and the answer, of course, is “et toi?” Clearly, the idea behind the question is that you're supposed to notice… but you've already been told, so there's nothing left to notice. Instead what you're left with is being told a rule and being asked what the rule you were told was, which is trivially easy and not really a “language” problem.
Worse, the explanation is empty and ambiguous. I know what it means, but I don't think a beginning language learner would. What does it mean to “bounce back” a question? It's not clear in the explanation what it means, and if you don't understand the dialogue (as a beginner wouldn't) you have no context to aid you. Pretty much anyone doing the exercise is going to get the right answer, but is likely to be confused about what's going on. This is pretty dangerous, because getting answers right and feeling lost is a massive demotivator to any learner.
But going back to the ordering, there's something similar going on in lesson 2 (the one on the Amazon preview). Question 2 asks what “mais” means. In order to work that out from the context, you need to understand that the dialogue at this point pivots from likes to dislikes, so to “notice” what it means you have to understand the entire sentence before and after, but then question 3 starts asking about the phrase used to say what the speaker doesn't like.
What we've got here is kind of paradoxical – each relies on the other for context and neither is available to the learner as context. This is typical of all three dialogues in each of the four languages – the learner is explicitly advised to use the context to work things out when there really is no comprehensible context given. (It's not i+1, it's i+100.)
Well, I say no context, but I really mean no context in the dialogue. The books cheat, and present hidden gist translations in the questions. You have no idea what the dialogue means, then you read the question “What phrase does Pierre use to ask Lauren what she likes?” and you now know there's a question along the lines of “what do you like?” in the dialogue, so you look for the question marks – there's two, and one is “et toi?” which hopefully the reader will recognise as the ill-defined “bounce back” from the previous lesson and therefore pick the other one. (Here, the choice of word “phrase” is probably going to stress out the poor reader, who won't want to quote the entire sentence/question but is unsure which part of the question is the “phrase” the book is looking for.)
Then things move from the sublime to the ridiculous, because after you finish the dialogue activities, then you move on to a section entitled “notice” that starts with… a vocabulary list. Question 1: “Notice the question phrase from the list above, and complete the sentence”. So the promise to learn by noticing from context has now been redefined as reading off a vocabulary list. I just literally shuddered after typing that.
Now, the whole questioning strategy here is worthless on a pedagogical level. In order to try to make sure that the reader can answer all the questions, they have been rendered trivially easy – you can do them without thinking. But you need to think to learn. My textbooks put it in fancier terminology – if the cognitive load of a task is too light, it does not engage learners – but that's more or less the gist of it.
Furthermore, when you ask a reader to find “the question phrase from the list above”, you are not talking about meaning. All you have to do is look at the list, find the solitary entry with a question mark and write the missing part of it in the gap. If you do not attend to meaning while doing a language exercise, you will not learn anything useful from it. As another poster wrote earlier, it's rote learning.
One of the weirdest questions asked is in the Amazon sample of Italian. You're asked what is Melissa's favourite “sport”? Now, the quotemarks are a deliberate hint that you're not looking for an actual sport – the answer is sleeping (dormire). This is new vocabulary. It is not a close enough cognate to anything in English (dormitory being the closest) to be transparent. It's a sarcastic answer, unexpected and totally unrelated to the context. You cannot answer this without looking forward to the vocab list, and once you do so, the idea of noticing and working out is gone.
Even where cognates are present, the book is overoptimistic about how transparent they are. The author seems to assume that words like “attivo” and “ovviamente” will be at least partially recognised as equivalent to “active” and “obvious”, but anyone who has made that assumption as a teacher in a classroom will have learnt the hard way that it's wrong. Italian's lost consonants are a huge hurdle for people unused to looking for cognates, and even some of the more seemingly-obvious cognates in French will completely pass the beginner by. (And I say this as someone who has made that very same mistake in a classroom before.)
Again on the theme of overestimating beginners, the “practice” sample on Amazon tries to cover basically half of Madrigal's Magic Key in half a page. Trivially, superficially, we can say that's too much to cover. But the problem goes deeper than that. The variety of language presented means that the learner is not going to be able to focus sufficiently. With far too many words presented, the student's attention will be drawn to the roots, and the suffixes will be ignored. The likely result is that the reader will not pay enough attention to learn them, and will instead default to the English equivalent.
Talking of pronunciation, there really is no evidence of any planning in the progression of phonemes, and I don't recall ever seeing another book that presents a list of new words, asks you to pronounce them and listen to a recording to see if you're right. We don't do that as teachers, because students can't do it. Worse, the list is a list of cognates (animal, tradition, statue, géographie, machine, message) and beginning students have even more difficulty with cognates because their brains are really stuck in English-reading-mode and it interferes horrendously with any tiny spark of foreign language reading ability they may have.
Bizarrely enough, the Spanish course has a very similar list (animal, tradición, novela, historia, restaurante, diccionario) but the task is instead just to practice pronouncing them with the audio track: “Notice” (that word again) “how different they sound from English, and repeat each word to mimic the speaker”.
Practice question 1 in the Italian Amazon sample is utterly appalling:
What is your favourite sport? Create a phrase that is true for you.
First up, so far we have only seen the name of one sport in the book, as far as I can see, so answering the question means heading for the dictionary. Secondly, the linguistic features required for the task are too complex:
____________ il mio sport preferito
Because now we've got to fill in the gap with the sport and notice that the little è is missing, but most beginners are going to get that wrong. Secondly, we've got to notice that we need a definite article, even though there has only been one example so far – and worse, the false example of “dormire è il mio sport preferito” implies that the article isn't required. And the reader is going to have to work out for himself how to read a dictionary, how to apply the correct il, la, lo or l' etc etc. And after all that, which has already practically guaranteed that you're going to get the answer wrong, you have no way of checking, and no way of correcting. As an exercise, it's worse than useless.
This thing of unmarked questions is a running theme.
“What English words can you think of that are likely to be Spanish cognates? Practise guessing four new cognates using the rules you've just learned, then use your Spanish dictionary to check your answers.”
It's undirected work, and the purpose and end goal are unclear. Worse, again it is a meaningless mechanical rote exercise, because you're using words as abstract things, not to convey meaning.
I am just this moment staring in disbelief at the “grammar explanation” section of the Spanish one… he's headed it me gusta... verb+noun. Now I know that a lot of teachers will avoid talking about the complexities of gustar/piace/plaire at the very beginning and that's fine (I don't personally like that way, but it's not the end of the world), but it looks to me like he's basically lying about it here, which only leads to additional confusion further down the road. With all the normal, not-back-to-front verbs he's used so far, why on Earth start with the back-to-front one as your core example.
The variation in grammar is also far too wide, with present simple, imperatives and infinitives all thrown in, and the strategy to handle that variation seems to be to ignore bits of it and let it fade into the background (eg “dimmi” is in conversation 2, but doesn't appear in the phrase list).
I've been looking at this in detail for a couple of hours – these books are bad in oh so many ways, and I'm sure if I kept looking I'd find even more to fault.
Now as to that question of ghost writer or not: I'd say definitely not. These books were written by someone who neither is an expert in language nor has any significant experience in a classroom. Hodder and Staughton would not have commissioned a ghost writer with such a lack of credentials, so we must assume that this is Benny's own work. The book was designed to a set of well-intentioned principles that were so naive that they had to be abandoned immediately, and then the author redefined the terms in order to convince himself that he was following them.
If these were web lessons by a member of this site, I'd say “good job” and then slowly feed in suggestions to improve it (eventually leading to a total rewrite), but it's not. It's a professionally published product that's going to be sold in bookshops around several countries. It's likely to sell thousands of copies. And it is crap. Total, utter crap.
Statistics: Posted by Cainntear — Sat Aug 13, 2016 8:37 pm