[B-Greek] Attrition Rates. Research?

Louis Sorenson llsorenson at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 11 15:24:31 EDT 2009


The following comes from http://evepheso.wordpress.com/?s=daniel+street written by Mike Aubrey:

....I haven’t even said anything about the attrition rate of the
classroom itself, which is completely horrible. D&T themselves experienced a 60% attrition rate in their class
and I’m cynical that the 4 students left standing at the end will all
be using their Hebrew in five years (for the record, they make it clear
that they have more confidence on that point than I do). Traditional
methodology requires maintenance outside the classroom as well – just
as much, I’d say.
Here’s the classroom attrition rate of my own traditional Greek learning:




Initial Students
Change
Final Total
Time
# of Classes


150
–>
115
1st Week
5 Classes


115
–>
90
2nd Semester
5 Classes


90
–>
45
2nd Year
2 Classes


45
–>
25
2nd Yr 2nd Sem
1 Class


25
–>
6-8
3rd Year
1 Class



Now isn’t that nice and depressing? And from what I understand, its
pretty consistent in other schools. In preparing for this post, I talk
with Daniel Streett on what the attrition rate looked like in his
communicative class. He told me that it was 25%. That’s relatively high
and he’s not satisfied with it. And in context, it actually looks
better than either D&T’s class or my own chart above.


Louis Sorenson




> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:11:01 +0300
> From: Randall Buth <randallbuth at gmail.com>
> Subject: [B-Greek] Attrition rates. Research?
> To: B Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<5680d1940908102211s7422f50v43da425e92ae42aa at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> >As regards Greek, not on http://www.lara.ox.ac.uk/seclang.php
> 
> >But if you have ATHENS you may find the following useful in tracking down literature that is useful by comparison
> PDF The Attrition of Foreign-Language Skills: A Literature Review
> WELTENS Applied Linguistics.1987; 8: 22-36
> http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/8/1/22
> 
> >That will be out of date - not including much of the work generated by Lynne Hansen and others regarding (in particular) Japanese-English and English-Japanese, but will include literature relating to grammar school classics teaching such as:
> Kennedy, L. (1932) The retention of certain Latin syntactical
> principles by first and second year Latin students after various time
> intervals. Journal of Educational Psychology 23, 132-146.
> 
> >Steven Cox>
> 
> This is discussing two different kinds of attrition rate. 1. the rate
> of dropout from
> classes or use of the language. 2. the attrition of skills taught in a class.
> 
> On number 2, one of the amazing things about TPR (total physical response)
> is its staying power with students. Attrition over summers ranges from
> 0 to 10%,
> which is as low as it gets.
> The real world would tend to back this up anecdotally since people have often
> commented how a language that had been used in a spoken environment
> comes back to that level very very fast.
> 
> ERRWSQE
> Randall Buth
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth at gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
> 
> 
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