As an alternative to the statistical testing of remembered words, I could mention three examples of how I measure the effectiveness of the way I work.
One is that after 60 hours, i.e two-weeks intensive, with members of two racial groups who are normally unfriendly towards one another ('occupied' Estonians and 'occupying' Russians), the students were using the new language (it was Swedish in this case) for everyday communication; and one of them arranged a week's concert tour for my renaissance-music ensemble, where the new language was our only way of communicating.
Another was after one 40-minute session in provincial Russia, at an ordinary state school - there was only that length of time when all six interested teachers were free, and even so the teacher who organised things had a group of six children to teach: so we put the six teachers and the six children together, sitting in a ring of children's chairs (I think they'd never sat in a ring before, and the teachers had certainly never sat in the children's chairs before... :-) ); for the first 20 minutes, we did four activities of five minutes each
- a song
- a suggestopedic 'first-concert' reading
- game
- and a relaxed review of the previous activities;
then the children went off to lunch happily babbling their new English words, and the teachers spent the second 20 minutes discussing what we'd experienced. As they left the room, two teachers of German who were near retirement-age and had learnt all their language and all their pedagogics under Stalin's influence, said with deep amazement "We begin to understand - we have to take away the stress........."
And the third I think I mentioned on one of the web-sites: an English course with Estonian and Russian young adults, living together for a week in the country, when they simply didn't want to go to bed: the sessions finished about 9 or 10 in the evening, and they then brought their blankets and sleeping bags and their hot chocolate and a guitar and they simply sat talking and singing and enjoying one another's company in the new language until the small hours of the morning - and were still up in time for the course start at 10 am... "We never knew people could be so nice..."
The excessively left-brained academic can say that these reactions aren't objective because they can't be measured and replicated: I would say they're objective as anything else in this world where human behaviour is the object for study, because they were written down at the time, and repeated in later letters intended for a general readership.
It also happens after just about every course I and my colleagues have, so it's pretty well replicable: being nice to people produces good results about as consistently as any other chemical process - there are always unpredictable aberrations... And actually there's no problem about quantifying things here - we just need to accept different criteria for quantifying...
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