Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
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Rosetta Stone
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6 thoughts on “Rosetta Stone”
I recommend anyone who lives near a community college, to contact the FL curriculum people and/or the registrar with this. I think Rosetta Stone is really trying to get into this market.
I recently called my local comm college about offering credit for an intensive TPRS class (modeled on Fluency Fast). I haven’t had much opportunity to discuss the prospect with people there, but they did inform me that Rosetta Stone had also made a request, and that they were probably not interested in my program nor theirs, but rather were happy with their current department. Good to hear that they have confidence in their instructors, but not good that Rosetta Stone is tainting the well for those of us who’d like to offer alternative HUMAN-BASED language instruction for area students for college credit.
By the way, when asked about Rosetta Stone in 2009 at the Fluency Fast teachers workshop in Denver, Krashen could not respond because he said he had not reviewed the program. So glad that he can now offer interested folks a succinct research-based answer, and that we have access to it!!
Thanks Steven!!!
An elementary school district in the Chicagoland area has implemented Rosetta Stone into the world language department. This is very scary. I made sure to forward Dr. Krashen’s research on to them.
The belief in technology is such a bust. As Dr. Krashen has said, “Robots don’t converse.”
Thanks for posting this. It’s good to see that there is at least a wee bit of research out there about this phenomenon.
Some family members and I have used this software before, and I feel like our experiences really echo the results of the studies you mentioned here, though I can’t really condemn it outright.
When I was taking Mandarin Chinese in undergrad, I worked all summer to purchase the Mandarin Rosetta Stone. Honestly, it helped a lot at that beginning level. My motivation was super high, and it helped me genuinely acquire a lot of things I learned in class. I picked-up a handful of simple phases, and structures that I would have missed by following along the simplistic dialogues found in my Chinese text-book.
Originally, I was thinking, “I am going to use this for an hour a day, and skip a level of Chinese!” The hour a day didn’t happen, but I was able to skip ahead through some diligent efforts. Though I didn’t zoom through the Rosetta courses at breakneck speed, I was able to use the phrases I acquired from the software with Chinese people in my local Falun Dafa meditation group. This boosted my motivation to stick with the language and kept me using Rosetta Stone for about a year. My favorite phase from the program – a nugget of comprehensible input gold – was, “How do you say this in Chinese?” (????????) Though I eventually got bored with the software around the end of the second level and stopped using it for a year or two. I won’t deny that it provided some much needed CI when I was not getting much in my college class.
The activity that really made me acquire Chinese was reading. For the past three years or so, I’ve read about an hour a day. Sometimes I read Dafa mediation books with my Chinese friends, other times I read on my own. Result of regular reading has been a good command of written and spoken Chinese, fairly solid grammar, and fluency to boot. While I still have the third level of Rosetta Chinese to finish (there likely are remaining chunks of vocab and grammar to gain), I’d much rather watch Taiwanese cooking shows on New Tang Dynasty TV or listen to radio broadcasts online. (I recently learned the phase “Turned (some color)” through watching a Taiwanese lady cook a fish.)
On another instance, my mom and I wanted to learn Vietnamese so we could go to South East Asia on vacation. I bought her the Rosetta software, but we didn’t really last through the first unit. Simply put, it wasn’t interesting, and we didn’t have a wealth of Vietnamese friends to practice with and help keep us motivated. The program is quietly sitting on my desktop until the day I find myself neck-deep in Vietnamese students or friends.
Another family member picked up Rosetta French after she retired and wanted to move past her false beginner status (mostly left over from High School). She really got into it at first, but got bored after doing the same repetitive matching tasks over and over again. Eventually she moved to the Michel Thomas audio lessons. I think she found them to be more engaging and intellectually stimulating. She is keeping he French up by going to a conversation group at the local senior citizens center.
As a teacher, I wouldn’t use Rosetta Stone in my classroom. It gets kinda boring after you move past the initial excitement, but I won’t deny that it gave me a good foundation when nobody else was willing to give me some good old i+1. Simply put, native speaking friends (who aren’t language teachers) aren’t always good at speaking i+1, bringing their output to your processing level. Rosetta Stone helped with that a lot. If I could ask simple questions (most of which I acquire from Rosetta rather than my Chinese textbook) people were able to answer. For a self taught learner with some target language friends, it was helpful. Without the later part of the equation, the program just acted like nice flashcards.
Really, I can’t give the program a thumbs up or thumbs down, because I’ve had mixed experiences, but I can say that Rosetta Stone was a good acquisition-style supplement when that was what I desperately needed. As a stand alone program… not so good, as a set of flashcards, fairly useful.
I tried it for intro Russian. It works but
A) it’s boring
B) the talking part– you have to repeat after it, it “listens,” and then it tells you if your pronunciation is/is not “good.”
The talking part I found pointless. It would be better if it presented mini stories, and asked comp questions, or if you could bypass the talking.
But in the absence of anything else, it’s not bad. I also like how it didn’t blather on about genders, declensions etc.