A Comparison of the Monostructural and Dialogue Approaches to the Teaching of College Spanish*

Conceptualizing Language Learners: Socioinstitutional Mechanisms and their Consequences

“…Articles in this decade continued to describe students generally or by their membership in a particular grade/year/course, either in traditional primary, secondary, and tertiary school settings, voluntary language schools (Ehrmann, ), or bilingual programs for Spanish‐speaking students in the United States (Saavedra, ), without mention of placement mechanisms or definitions of proficiency levels. Language aptitude continued to be a sorting mechanism both for empirical study (Blickenstaff & Woerdehoff, ) and for course placement (Hansen, ; Johnson, Flores, & Ellison, ), with explicit mentions of both the Modern Language Aptitude Test and the more recently developed Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (Pimsleur & Struth, ). And while there was no mention of student outcomes determining progress from one course to the next, there was empirical interest in measuring the impact of pedagogical practices on course grades (Politzer, ), standardized language assessments, like the MLA Cooperative Spanish Test (Blickenstaff & Woerdehoff, ), and sometimes also teacher ranking (Payne & Vaughn, ).…”

Progress in Language Classroom Research: Evidence from The Modern Language Journal, 1916‐2000

“…Although there appeared to be a positive effect of this device, its use brought about inherent inconvenience and oddity, so it did not appear further in classroom studies. Finally, Blickenstaff and Woerdehoff (1967) provided a detailed accounting of the materials and procedures that differentiated their two pattern drill approaches (with respectively decontextualized structures and contextualized dialogue use). In addition, they outlined in much greater detail than previous classroom research the reliabilities of their extensive test measures, and they were the first explicitly to employ analysis of covariance to adjust for initial differences-although researchers from the beginning of the Journal's publication had shown concern and attempts to adjust for lack of equivalence between treatment groups.…”

“…Appropriate use of assessment measures is critical to obtaining reliable and valid results in classroom research, and it is alternatively encouraging and discouraging to see the attention paid to this issue from quite early studies up until the present. Whereas Deihl (1916) provided no quantified assessment of his students' learning, the use of tests with demonstrated reliabilities occurred reasonably early (Young & Vander Beke, 1926), aided later on by the development of standardized tests, such as the MLA Cooperative batteries in several languages (as in, e.g., Hamilton & Haden, 1950;Blickenstaff & Woerdehoff, 1967). Also, researchers were not unaware of the need to use different assessments in order to evaluate the learning effects for different groups (as in Pargment, 1927, whose final form-focused exam nonetheless favored the grammar-translation group, but this group also could read better than the Direct Method group).…”