Free advertising for Rosetta Stone

To the editor,

There is good reason to believe that “Language learning should be natural,” (July 4), but there is no reason to believe that Rosetta Stone is an effective way to do it.

The Times has provided free advertising for a method that has no published scientific evidence supporting its claims.

In contrast, there have been many studies published in professional scientific journals showing that other ways of making language acquisition natural work quite well, far better than traditional grammar-based approaches.

These approaches include beginning methods such as TPRS (Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling) and intermediate approaches such as extensive self-selected reading. They do not require expensive computers and software.

Stephen Krashen

Professor Emeritus

University of Southern California