Thursday, December 21, 2006

AUA Small Talk

The AUA materials include a great book of dialogues entitled "Small Talk" by Adrian S. Palmer. Since I am experimenting with Skype language exchanges through Mixxer, I am working with this book and CDs again.

The CDs were originally intended for practice drills, but I am using them primarily as a source of comprehensible input. I focus on listening and understanding the phrases and dialogues, rather than trying to follow the drills out loud. If past experience is any indication, new words and phrases will find their own way into my speech after sufficient listening. At times, I do find myself speaking along with the tape, but I don't try to make that happen.

The presence of repetition and substitution drills means that most of the input is not exactly natural, but that drawback is counterbalanced by the fact that, for me, the level is almost perfectly i+1. Also, as with all the AUA CDs, there's very little L1, which is great.

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