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teaching. For those skills tested, CC was superior, while AL classes scored at national (MLA) norms. The results of previous studies force us to ask whether this advantage would have been maintained in the second year.
Table 5.2 gives us some idea as to the degree of superiority shown by one method over another. What is obvious is that both methods result in some progress; students do better at the end of the course than at the beginning. While differences are occasionally significant, they are certainly not huge.
Table 5.2
Degree of superiority shown in comparative method studies (American series)
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Listening
MLA Cooperative Tests: Reading1 Writing1 comp. Speaking2
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AL 26 59 25 51
CC 30 64 26 49
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From: Chastain and Woerdehoff (1968) Tests administered after one year of university level study of Spanish.
The first group of studies looked at language teaching efficacy over one or two years, using proficiency tests. Another group of studies focussed rather on specific structures over a shorter time span. These studies are the result of the GUME project, which dealt with English as a foreign language in Sweden. The GUME project studies are summarized in Table 5.3.
The GUME project aimed to compare AL type teaching with "cognitive" methods, the latter being quite similar to the cognitive-code system. I will not present their results study-by-study, but will attempt instead to summarize the overall results; the interested reader can refer to Table 5.3 for details, or to the studies themselves (see especially von Elek and Oskarsson, 1975, for a complete review of the adult studies).
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