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Variation of Direct Method in Teaching
The series method is a variety of direct method in that experiences are directly connected to the target language. Gouin felt that such direct “translation” of experience into words, makes for a “living language”. Goin also noticed that children organize concepts in a succession of time, relating a sequence of concepts in the same order. Gouin’s method is based on arranging concepts in series. Gouin suggested that students learn a language more quickly and retain it better if it is presented through a chronological sequence of events.
Students learn sentences based on an action such as leaving a house in the order in which such would be performed. Gouin found that if the series of sentences are shuffled, their memorization becomes nearly impossible. For this, Gouin preceded psycholinguistic theory of the 20th century. He found that people will memorize events in a logical sequence, even if they are not presented in that order. He also discovered a second insight into memory called “incubation”.
Linguistic concepts take time to settle in the memory. The learner must use the new concepts frequently after presentation, either by thinking or by speaking, in order to master them. His last crucial observation was that language was learned in sentences with the verb as the most crucial component. Gouin would write a series in two columns: one with the complete sentences and the other with only the verb. With only the verb elements visible, he would have students recite the sequence of actions in full sentences of no more than twenty-five sentences. Another exercise involved having the teacher solicit a sequence of sentences by basically ask him/her what s/he would do next. While Gouin believed that language was rule-governed, he did not believe it should be explicitly taught. His course was organized on elements of human society and the natural world. He estimated that a language could be learned with 800 to 900 hours of instruction over a series of 4000 exercises and some work. The idea “vas that each of the exercises would force the student to think about the vocabulary in terms of its relationship with the natural world. While-there is evidence that the method can work extremely well, it has some serious flaws.
One of which is the teaching of subjective language, where the students must. 11lake judgments about what is experienced in the world (e.g. “bad” and “good”) as such do not relate easily to one single common experience. However, the real weakness is that the method is entirely based on one experience of a three-year-old. Gouin did not observe the child’s earlier language development such as naming (where only nouns are learned or the role that stories have in human language development. What distinguishes the series method from the direct method is that vocabulary must be learned by translation from the native language, at least the beginning.
