The Dialogue Approach
Dialogue and the Four Language Learning Thresholds

The Listening Threshold

1. Sounds: Ear Preparation

There are certainly “sound machines” but, added to the fact that they are psychologically unpleasant to use, they demand great levels of patience and fortitude. So many students, disappointed at their previous experience, have called Dialogue in order to have a greater human touch, one that validates them and gives them effective learning levels.

All Dialogue training starts with an education, or rather a re-education, of the ear. What use is it to repeat and ask the student to memorize words and expressions he cannot understand? Starting with ear education gains precious time and avoids common frustrations. If any time in the course of the training the need seems critical, a good deal of the instruction is dedicated to this format.

How does the Dialogue approach educate the ear? By presenting language sounds, by exercising auditory discrimination, and message decoding.

Presenting the Vocal Trapezoid and the Consonants

Since most of the time the student has no familiarity with the international phonetic alphabet, we give him the vowels—and this supports the natural approach—that he will encounter most often in reading, but in the form of a vocal triangle or trapezoid figure. This technique gives the learner a clear idea of what needs to happen in the vocal organs to produce a given vowel.

The pronunciation of each sound allows a “radioscopy” to occur in the ear, letting the learner detect the sounds he doesn’t know, to detect the filters extant in the mother tongue. “The larynx, let’s remember, only emits harmonics the ear can hear.” It is hence rather easy, in asking the learner to repeat the sounds, to isolate those he doesn’t truly hear. If in doubt, an auditory discrimination test may be useful.

Exercises in Auditory Discrimination

To make sure that the learner hears certain sounds and in order to train his ear to re-hear all of the frequencies needed (in expression and comprehension), the Dialogue trainer often employs auditory discrimination exercises. Thanks to this comparison technique, using opposition of sounds, the learner comes rapidly to differentiate sounds he earlier confused.

Decoding Messages

The next step to better auditory comprehension involves decoding messages. This can be done on a global level, but also—and here Dialogue is unique—on a word for word basis. It is worth noting that many learners who don’t yet have the ability to hear all the sounds expend enormous energy trying to compensate, to guess, with both good and bad results, the content of the message.

As Krashen suggests, Dialogue sends messages whose content is slightly above the learner’s performance level (l+1). Dialogues originality lies in putting into place a technique of discrimination that replaces bare sounds with their “sound context.” It is one thing for a learner to detect each sound of the target language; real difficulties arise when attempting to catch these same sounds in a message, in a natural environment composed of many sounds. Thanks to the technique, Dialogue guides the learner toward a state of “transparency” in hearing the message.

Working on the messages as reformulations also helps comprehension significantly. The act of learning the language in the country contributes to better comprehension from the moment—we insist—that the ear is ready, is changed. All Dialogue training, wherever situated, recreates these ideal learning conditions, all at once, to improve comprehension, enhance expression, and break through the cultural threshold.