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Prof. Dodson taught me the Bilingual method when I was studying to become a language teacher at the University of Aberystwyth in about 1987. It was an immense relief to me to hear such things as he was saying. They resonated extremely strongly with me because I vividly remembered German lessons in the mid-1970s when masses of time was wasted by my German teacher who stoutly refused to use English even when trying to explain almost undefinable words ("weil" was one I particularly remember) without using our mother tongue, English. We pupils tried to guess what "weil" might mean. We thought of various possibilities but we wanted to be certain. As our frustration grew we pleaded with her to "Just tell us the English word, Miss!" She continued to struggle to explain in German, which we didn't really understand well enough. Many minutes of mutual frustration passed - she with our refusal to be content with guessing, and we with her refusal to be practical and tell us the translation so that we could stop trying to hold multiple guesses in our heads; until someone called out "Does it mean 'Because?'" She sighed with relief and nodded and smiled - and still gamely tried not to speak any English. We all sighed with relief too - of a rather sarcastic sort. "Miss, if you'd just told us at the beginning, we could have saved all that time. And you only knew we knew when someone shouted it out in English, so you might just as well have said it in English yourself." She and we had just wasted many minutes on a rather painful guessing game. Her unfortunate method had made us adolescents needlessly annoyed.
When you are learning a language there is no benefit in guessing several different possible meanings for a word; indeed it is quite a mental strain to hold them simultaneously in your mind. Knowing the meaning in your mother tongue gives you much greater confidence in using the foreign word.
Why do people feel it is somehow wrong to know explicitly that "weil" means "because"? Why should that knowledge hamper one's ability to absorb the German word? That knowledge gives one security with the German word. If there are subtle differences of meaning or use or grammar between "weil" and "because", those will be learned well enough once the basic meaning is clear in one's mind, not before.
As I sat in Prof Dodson's classes and heard his description of his own experiences as a teenager it sounded extremely familiar, and I felt it an enormous and unexpected relief to find that someone - the man who was teaching me how to teach - had worked out how to solve the pupil's frustrations and create a more sensible teaching method. If I remember correctly, he came to Britain from Germany at the age of about 15 (probably one of the thousands fleeing the Nazis?), and he struggled with the refusal of his English teacher to tell him the German translations of the English words he was trying to teach him.
Another teacher who espoused Dodson's method is Butzkamm, who has written an interesting essay on his adoption of the bilingual method at http://www.fremdsprachendidaktik.rwth-aachen.de/Ww/changed.html. — Preceding unsigned comment added by UBJ 43X (talk • contribs) 22:49, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
