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THE DARTMOUTH Intensive Language Model (DILM), first developed by John Rassias to train Peace Corps volunteers, has been applauded for its success in teaching the spoken language. Although surveys of American colleges and universities indicate that few graduating language majors have minimal oral fluency (Carroll 134; Stansfield and Hornor 25), Dartmouth reports much greater than average success for students enrolled in its program of intensive language instruction, claiming that oral fluency can be achieved after only twenty to thirty weeks of instruction. Other institutions adopting the model have also reported dramatic improvement in speaking competence (Byrd 300-01; Johnston 105-06; Stansfield and Hornor 25).
Intrigued by these accounts, members of our language faculty attended a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1983 and came away convinced that the DILM program of foreign language instruction had the potential to enhance our small-college curriculum. Faced, however, with limitations imposed by the small size of our institution and by financial constraints, we could not adopt the DILM in its entirety but had to make major changes in the model. At issue was whether a scaled-down version of the DILM would be effective enough to justify the investment and the necessary changes, Our four-year experiment has shown that even a smaller-scale adaptation of the model can have sufficient positive results to make the program worth undertaking.
Discussions with faculty members from other institutions participating in the Dartmouth workshop had convinced us that advanced undergraduate students could effectively teach their peers. Laboratory sections taught by advanced students could provide more language contact hours and more opportunity for elementary students to hear and to speak the language. We realized that, even without the availability of graduate students, the introduction of apprentice teachers into our language program could transform a department of two into a department of eight.
The Dartmouth Model is an intensive immersion program requiring up to twelve and one half contact hours a week and using a three-phased system to reinforce the material to be learned. All new material is first presented by the faculty instructor (master teacher) in the master class, which meets five hours a week. Students must then spend one half hour a day in the language lab and an additional hour a day in a small-group practice session with the apprentice teacher. 1
The DILM intensive practice session helps to improve speaking because newly presented material is immediately reinforced and rehearsed without reliance on the book. Students have nothing to look at. Instead, they hear and respond to the spoken language only, become accustomed to this kind of communication, and progressively gain greater confidence that they can understand and be understood in the language. Whereas in the conventional classroom each student responds an average of three to four times a class hour, in the DILM intensive practice sessions each student responds at least sixty-five times an hour ( Effective Language Teaching ).
While no one would disagree that taped exercises have great value for listening comprehension and oral practice, nothing can replace a live partner. Attention in the language lab is difficult to monitor and not always optimal. Many beginners feel awkward about speaking to a tape recorder and refuse to answer out loud. Attention improves dramatically, however, when a student instructor leads the practice and calls on students at random to respond. The student instructor, as well as the group, hears the student's answers, heightening the motivation to respond correctly and intelligibly, and anxiety about speaking the language before others is gradually lessened. At the end of the year students taught by the DILM are much less inhibited about speaking than are those taught by other methods.
The student instructor acts as a role model for the novice language learner and can communicate an enthusiasm for language learning with which beginning students identify, especially if the apprentice teacher has actually been to the foreign country. For this reason we also hoped to arrange for our student instructors to spend at least a summer or a semester studying abroad.
At the end of the term students taught under the DILM are orally tested by other members of the Dartmouth language faculty. We particularly wanted to introduce this kind of testing as a way of monitoring the effectiveness of our own program and to show students what they had accomplished.
At our small liberal arts institution we were restricted by severe economic constraints, small faculty size, a limited number of students at the advanced levels, no language lab, and—at the time of implementing the DILM—no study-abroad programs. Despite these limitations both the division chair and the academic dean approved the plan because of its relative cost-effectiveness as well as its pedagogical merits. We requested and received from the administration three thousand dollars to hire five student instructors for the following fall. Because of assistance from federal work-study funding, this amount was more than sufficient.
Critical to the success of the DILM is the apprentice teacher. Here we faced our severest limitation: because our institution offered only a major in German and a minor in French, we had few students advanced enough to serve as instructors. The French program consisted of a four-semester course offering. Thus our most advanced students had completed only two years of college French, although some had also studied French in high school. The German program, offering a thirty-one-hour major, produces one to two graduates a year and can provide third- and fourth-year student candidates. (Only under the terms of a generous grant from the NEH has a new Spanish program leading to a major been initiated this year.)
In addition, unlike Dartmouth students, who had been taught under the method themselves before serving as instructors, our students were totally inexperienced with the procedures and expectations of the model program. Most frequently Dartmouth students who have completed a one-quarter study-abroad program are selected as drill instructors. In contrast, only two of our candidates had visited the country of the language they aspired to teach.
While Dartmouth students spend as many as twelve and one half contact hours weekly in intensive language instruction, financial and curricular restrictions forced us to decrease the number of contact hours to six. One element of the program that had to be cut was the two and one half hour lab attendance requirement. Lacking a language laboratory, in which students could be assigned to listen to tapes daily, we arranged instead for cassette tapes to be checked out from the audiovisual center for use at home.
Despite these limitations we went ahead with our approved plan for a modified version of the program. During the summer we sent letters to students we considered most likely to make able apprentice teachers, inviting them to the training workshop and to tryouts scheduled for the first Saturday before the semester began. To our relief, all the students we wrote were eager to participate in the program, even though they did not know exactly what would be expected of them.
While training workshops at larger institutions normally last three days, ours lasted only one day. The small pool of candidates, eight in all, made it possible for each student to practice with the group and to lead several rounds of drill over the course of the day.
We began the workshop by showing a videotape of the training of apprentice teachers at Dartmouth: the Rassias film Effective Language Teaching . The Dartmouth training workshop stresses animation and pacing and the commitment expected of apprentice teachers. Our candidates were judged on pronunciation, animation, and teaching technique. Of the eight, five were chosen to begin teaching the following week.
Four years of selecting and coaching apprentice teachers have yielded some further guidelines: effective assistant instructors are conscientious and self-motivated students. Even students who are highly gifted and animated drill leaders cannot command the respect of the class if they are not consistently well prepared. Thus the best apprentice teacher is not always the most animated or the most advanced student; even students who are relatively inexperienced in the language can be very successful if they are personable, highly motivated, and conscientious.
Whereas Dartmouth students spend up to five hours weekly in the master class, an additional five hours in the small-group.practice sessions, plus one half hour daily in the language lab, our adapted program provided for only four hours weekly in the master class and two hours with the apprentice teachers. To the fall schedule we added two one-hour “labs” (small-group practice sessions) carrying zero credit hours for elementary language classes. Initially we designated these labs as “oral homework” for language classes and did not make homework assignments on the days the labs met. The second year, however, we resumed giving daily assignments, in order to be able to complete the first-year textbooks. It was taken for granted that languages should have labs just as other subjects did.
Scheduling the lab times presented greater obstacles. At a small institution, where only one or two sections can be offered for each course, scheduling conflicts affect every action. The first year we tried scheduling all labs at either 8:00 a.m. or 5:00 p.m. as in the Dartmouth model. These times turned out to be very unpopular with everyone. It was impossible to schedule a lab section for some students who worked, participated in athletic programs, or had musical rehearsals, and they were forced to drop the course. The second year we discovered that the most advantageous time slots were at 12:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays for French, and at 10:00 or 11:00 Wednesday and 12:00 Friday for German (which meets at noon Monday through Thursday). These times have proved much more popular.
We had to decide whether to pay apprentice teachers in credit hours or in hourly wages. Since the Dartmouth model pays students the minimum wage for two hours of preparation plus the one hour of teaching per drill session, we repeated this plan. Students received $3.35 an hour for two hours teaching plus four hours preparation a week. Since the number of apprentice teachers had to be increased this fall and a weekly briefing session with the master teachers has been added, students currently are paid for only one hour of preparation per drill class, instead of for two hours. At Emory and Henry College, where apprentice teachers have been paid according to the same schedule (one hour of instruction plus one hour of preparation), it is estimated that approximately one-fourth of the funds have come directly from federal work-study funding as part of students' financial aid packages (Byrd 299–300).
The assistant instructor does not teach but rather spends the fifty-minute class as a drill leader. To keep up a lively pace in these practice sessions, it is essential to construct effective and interesting drills. If the assistant teacher is the heart of the program, then the drill unit is the core of the pedagogical approach. The basic unit is structured as Rassias explains in his workshop: two choral repetitions of a sentence, four or five individual and rapid changes, and two final choral repetitions. It is this repetition that transforms itself into meaningful communication later. Good drills provide variety. They must be short enough to be held in oral memory and yet offer enough complexity so that manipulation is a challenge. Students respond best to communicative exercises that approximate real conversations, and allow them to respond with opinions or meaningful information about themselves.
Because the apprentice teachers are not trained language teachers, they do not compose the exercises themselves; all drill materials are supplied by the master teachers. So that the apprentice teachers may spend the time in class most efficiently in direct communication with their beginning students, the master teacher meets with the apprentice teachers for one half hour before the class in which the drills are to be presented. He or she clarifies the purpose of each exercise and checks them with the apprentice teachers. The assistant teachers have reviewed the material in advance and are ready to rehearse the drills with their master teacher. This rehearsal time is crucial to the smooth functioning of the following hour. During the rehearsal, questions on intonation patterns, pronunciation, and grammatical forms are raised and answered, and we see how the drills work before they are presented to the students. When changes are needed, it is often the apprentice teacher who improves the drill. Most apprentice teachers enjoy this personal review of grammar and intonation practice.
The last phase of our adaptation of the Dartmouth Intensive Language Model was the introduction of an end-of-semester interview with another faculty member. This requirement presented a difficulty for our department of two, each teaching a different language. We solved this problem by enlisting the help of other members of the faculty and staff who were not language teachers but fluent speakers of the languages we wanted to test. Because they share our enthusiasm for foreign language study and were asked to interview only a few students each, they readily agreed to the experiment. Instead of calling this interview an oral test, we billed it as a simulated field interview with a “native” speaker.
Initially our students expressed anxiety about being graded in such an interview situation. To make the foreign language interview—a new experience for most of them—less traumatic, we agreed not to give students a grade for it but made participation a requirement for completion of the course. Although it is tempting to grade students' performance, we have not yet changed our approach, because several of our interviewers are not members of the language teaching faculty and because students have responded positively to the interview as an ungraded experience. Most students come away surprised and delighted with their progress and newly aware of the significance of communication in a language other than English.
The results of our adaptation of the DILM can be judged in objective and subjective ways: objectively by retained enrollments and numbers of majors in the program, subjectively by written student evaluations and by observations of the quantity and quality of foreign language spoken by our students.
First of all, the aim of increasing speaking practice has been achieved: in monitoring small-group practice sessions during the first year of the program, we found that students were responding even more than the expected sixty-five times an hour. With fast-paced drills, students were speaking up to eighty times in a class period. This intensive reinforcement of principles introduced in the master class is critically important in learning to speak the language comfortably. Students feel confident of their abilities to construct answers, to manipulate and combine the memorized elements, and consequently are more creative and spontaneous in classroom activities than were similar groups of students in the past. A noticeable result of the experiment has been a marked increase in students' willingness to speak in the foreign language outside class.
Not only have elementary students shown increased spontaneity in speaking, but the apprentice teachers have benefited immensely from the experience of practicing the language with other students. They have become much better and more confident speakers as they themselves review grammar structures and vocabulary. This increased practice and motivation makes them excellent students in their subsequent foreign language classes.
Second, to our surprise we found that reading skills are also strengthened. Because new verb tenses, relative pronouns, and interrogatives are introduced and systematically reinforced, students recognize them and understand their usage in the written text more quickly than former students did. The practice gained through the drill groups leads to greater understanding of a literary work and hence to greater facility in discussing that understanding.
A third positive remit has been the response to the end-of-semester interview. Students expressed feelings ranging from pride to exhilaration at their ability to communicate in a foreign language in a real-life situation. As one student put it on his student evaluation form, it was “like solo flying the first time.” Because the faculty members who did the interviewing did not know what grammar structures and vocabulary the students had covered in their first-year textbooks, their conversations with students realistically simulated an encounter with a native speaker. We found the ungraded informal oral proficiency interview a powerful factor in helping the student decide to enroll in a second year of foreign language study.
Responses to the DILM on evaluation questionnaires were overwhelmingly favorable. Students found the method both diverting and challenging. Groups trained under this program felt much more positive about what they had learned by the end of the first year. After the “field” interview, they were enthusiastic about continuing their study and about what they would be able to achieve the following year. More students continued on to intermediate language courses and more students enrolled in upper-division courses. This year in German, the only language that currently offers a full major, one hundred percent of first-year students, who were not required to take a second year of language (and who were not graduating, moving, or failing), elected to enroll in the intermediate class. Upper-division courses, formerly populated by majors only, now have up to fifty percent nonmajors and have increased in size correspondingly. The number of current German majors has grown from two to seven in four years. In the first two years of the program, two apprentice teachers, who had not previously selected German as a major, did so after serving as student instructors. Three students have already signed up for the new summer study-abroad program that is being launched this year.
The experiment with a modified version of the DILM has generated an enthusiastic affirmation of the method. The modifications made were dictated by economic necessity, but because the model is pedagogically sound and psychologically appropriate, even a significantly scaled-down version of it produced notable improvements in our language program. Its pedagogical soundness results from the use of systematic repetition and reinforcement of new material. Opportunities for each student to speak the language in class have increased from four times to at least sixty-five times in an hour, with exercises that provide meaningful, not parroted, expression.
The exuberant vitality and enthusiasm advocated by Rassias to overcome student inhibitions, although a significant part of the method's psychological effectiveness, can also be modified in a range of styles to suit the personalities of master teachers and student apprentices. It is not necessary to be as flamboyant, outrageous, or dramatic as Rassias himself. More pedestrian personality types can create their own approaches with appropriate vitality and enthusiasm.
The major difficulties to be overcome in installing a DILM program are (1) the approval and scheduling of the required number of weekly contact hours, (2) the expense of paying apprentice teachers (which can be partly off-set by work-study funds), and (3) the extra time required initially to prepare interesting and creative drills. A scaled-down adaptation of the program can decrease the size of the investment to be made in scheduling, funding, and drill writing—factors that may have previously prevented some institutions from attempting the model. But modification does not decrease the essential viability and soundness of the program. Originally we wanted an efficient way of helping our students gain proficiency in speaking the foreign language, so that they could begin to experience the excitement that comes with being able to communicate in another language. For us the DILM provided psychologically sound and pedagogically appropriate answers to our problem. The student who emerges after a year—or better, after two years—of French or German under this program can communicate on the streets of Bourges or Berlin. When this happens, we can be assured that we have shared the “romance” of language learning.
The authors are, respectively, Associate Professor of German at Phillips University, and Instructor of French it; the Garfield County Public Schools,Garfield County, Oklahoma.
1 Contact hours vary with different languages. For example, German classes meet four times a week, with four hours of small-group practice sessions and no language lab requirement.
Byrd, Charles W., Jr. “Intensive Language Instruction at a Small Liberal Arts College: The Dartmouth Model at Emory and Henry.” Modern Language Journal 64 (1980): 297–302.
Carroll, John B. “The Foreign Language Proficiency Levels Attained by Language Majors near Graduation from College.” Foreign Language Annals 1 (1967): 131–51.
Effective Language Teaching . Dir. David Gluck. With John Rassias. Film. Exxon Corp. Administrative Services Dept., Audio Visual Div., 1975.
Johnston, Otto W. “Implementing the Intensive Language Model: An Experiment in German at the University of Florida.” Foreign Language Annals 13 (1980): 99–106.
“Rassias Method Workshops.” Brochure Hanover: Dartmouth College Language Outreach, 1985.
Stansfield, Charles, and Jeanne Hornor. “The Dartmouth-Rassias Model of Teaching Foreign Languages.” ADFL Bulletin 12.4 (1981): 23–27. [Show Article]
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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