The Dialogue Approach
Dialogue and the Four Language Learning Thresholds

The Listening Threshold

2. Sounds: Preparation of the Mouth

Understanding another person is one thing; the student also must respond. Understanding grammar and knowing vocabulary is scant help if the student’s pronunciation and intonation aren’t acceptable. Many students call Dialogue after having come to this sad realization. Preparation of the ear so one can speak better is a necessary rite of passage. Having an ear that can rapidly and accurately distinguish the sounds of the language allows the student to get over the pronunciation threshold, indistinguishable, we think, from the hearing threshold.

In being influenced by the verbo-tonal correction technique of Professor R. Renard (reflecting the methodology of SGAV/Saint-Cloud-Zagreb), and Professor Intravaia’s “differential pronunciation” technique (both from the University of Mons in Belgium), Dialogue, all the while keeping to natural learning conditions, creates over a minimum time span the automaticities required to produce truly sounds.

Conclusion

To get through the hearing barrier is basic; it is nothing less than accessing communication. Insofar as the student fails to get over the hurdle, he is ill at ease, he must try to guess too many things and make his interlocutor repeat too much. This is a substantial obstacle to learning; one can repeat and reuse only with difficulty that which one does not fully hear. If the instructor is not sensitive to this issue, bad habits of expression weasel their way in, and we know how much more difficult it is to re-educate that to educate. One can of course hear perfectly without truly understanding. Getting through the cultural threshold avoids this pitfall.