The Dialogue Approach
To communicate rapidly and effectively in a foreign language

Owning the Language

2. Skinner Through Socratic Eyes

To accomplish 3000 repetitions to generate a sub-capacity is unrealistic. But we are influenced by Skinner’s coactive method, which is especially associated with the phenomena of reinforcement (repetition of the act), motivation (immediate reward), and exclusion of error (no punishment), with a good dose of Socrates and his method of using dialogues, in order to arrive at a remarkable result. It inculcates, thanks to natural questioning, useful structures and vocabulary, pronunciation, and acceptable intonation into memory over a relatively short period of instruction. The learner, in responding to questions that all revolve around an abiding theme, learns to juggle the structures and vocabulary (synonyms, antonyms, etc.) without resort to the trap of translation. The students correct, within the context of the communication, their errors of internal structure. They train their sub-capacities of comprehension, decoding questions, listening to authentic models, and identifying messages (from the global down to the particular).

To allow the student to automatize the sub-capacities, the Dialogue trainer helps the student learn to conserve the most important keys of the session. Every Dialogue session ends by recording key sentences, those that turned out to be most important in that particular lesson. The pause left after each sentence allows the learner to repeat and hence accelerate the process of making it all automatic. At the next session, student and trainer systematically review these sentences, in the Socratic manner, with the goal of cementing the process of automatization and reinforcing the material as it seems necessary to do so. Living through each session in a milieu where the target language is spoken, learners also have the opportunity to apply what they have learned. After the training, they spend 15 minutes a day on sentences which have been created specifically for their communications needs in order to achieve automatic sub-capacities and reach an ability to speak with greater spontaneity.