Special information for university and college language instructors
As the developer of the Feedback Training Method I need your help.
This entirely new method for spoken language instruction is extremely popular with students because they are learning spoken English so much more quickly than they have ever learned it before. But that does not mean that the method is complete. Far from it. The method actually needs much more work before it is fully developed.
The world’s truly great ideas and technologies have never been perfected by a single individual. Typically, there is an innovator who initially introduces the idea. Yet before that idea becomes truly successful, many others need to make significant contributions and changes. Just as this has been true in the development of flight, powered ships, electronics, and photography (to name just a few), so it has been true in every area of education.
I believe that the emphasis the Feedback Training Method places on training the tongue’s nerve receptors simultaneously with memory is totally new and different from all other language learning methods. (See Chapter 1 Teaching Your Tongue to Speak English in the downloadable book Speak English.) It certainly is not a part of ESL methodology. It was not a part of the Direct Method, and it was not a part of the Audio-Lingual Method.
Yet the originator of the Feedback Training Method is not the one to perfect it. You who are instructors of spoken language are the ones to do so. This method needs evaluation, criticism, and correction by many others who are in the field of language instruction. It also needs that evaluation from a large number of language specialists who do not speak English as their first language.
The Feedback Training Method’s greatest weakness is that it has not been statistically compared with other methods. It also needs to be applied on a larger scale than it can be as a single course on this website, even though hundreds of thousands of students are using the course and over one million CDs containing the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons are being downloaded each year.
Finally, I am not interested in promoting my name as the developer of this method. I want the method itself to succeed after others have assisted in improving it. My greatest desire is that, by using this method, students studying spoken languages will become fluent speakers of their target language in considerably less time than it now requires. To that end, it serves my purpose best if others who evaluate and develop this method receive full credit for their work.
This is what I suggest to those of you who are university and college instructors in spoken languages, or who are post-graduate students planning thesis projects:
- Download a free copy of the book Speak English from the website.
- Download a free CD containing the entire Spoken English Learned Quickly course from the website.
- Use the book and CD to evaluate the Feedback Training Method’s effectiveness. I encourage you to publish your evaluation of the method, stating what you see as its strengths as well as its weaknesses. Make suggestions to improve the method in both your teaching and your published evaluations.
- Finally, as a long term project, develop your own language instruction courses using the Feedback Training Method. More—and better—language instruction courses using this method are needed in both English and other languages. Having devoted a large portion of eight years of my life to this Spoken English Learned Quickly course, I fully understand the work that will be required. Nonetheless, I encourage you to become involved in the production of better language instruction programs for future language students.
I have another reason for making this offer. Letting others copy and sell our material is the way we advertise www.FreeEnglishNow.com. Therefore, I also encourage you to translate the Speak English book into your language and copy the CD to sell for your own profit. You never pay a royalty fee to Free English Now for making a profit from this book or selling the CD. In fact, you do not even need to inform us that you published the book. We also need book publishers to market the book Speak English.