This is from Diane Neubauer:
Hi Ben,
Mimi Met recently came up in conversation there, and I heard interesting news on Saturday evening about her and ACTFL types more generally. This relates to an apparent turn towards CI (with some degree accuracy of what they mean by that). If ACTFL has this kind of talk at a StarTalk leaders’ conference, I think it is likely the next thing ACTFL in general will emphasize. (But at the conference at least, without reference to those who’ve advocated this means of acquiring another language or those who have worked for so many years to teach that way. That seems unscrupulous.) Nonetheless, perhaps it means some improvement in ACTFL is indeed happening.
So, last Saturday, 5 of us Chinese types were out to dinner together. (May I just say here that CI teachers are really great people to hang around with. Really fun evening. I’m looking forward to spending time with people at iFLT…) Reed Riggs had been in town for a conference for people who lead StarTalk programs for “critical languages” teachers and students. (For the sake of the PLC members who don’t know: Reed is in a PhD program in Hawaii related to SLA and Chinese language and pedagogy, and is Terry Waltz’s assistant in the TPRS summer training there.) There were a lot of speakers, including Mimi Met. Here’s a link to all the presentations:
https://startalk.umd.edu/conferences/2015/spring/presentationsandhandouts
What Reed said about her talk really surprised me: except for apparently nothing on the need for compellingly interesting and personalized language use, Mimi Met gave a quite persuasive and clear description of what Comprehensible Input is and examples of how to provide it. I wrote to Reed again to check details because it’s not at all her message from past years. He said it was not just her speaking of the value of Comprehensible Input though, but a more general trend, and noticeably different from previous years at that same conference.
To save myself some trouble, that email is below. My comments are in italics:
[Mimi Met’s] document doesn’t have any of the videos or pictures or stories she showed at the presentation, and she was also giving a lot of examples of what is not comprehensible (like a cartoon of an old grandpa sleeping on an armchair, and we had to guess the vocab word). She was also open to lots of feedback from the audience, including when someone said they didn’t comprehend a “comprehensible” (yet 100% Chinese language) video, and she asked if we were comfortable talking to each other in groups, because previous audiences had complained about the frequent peer interaction, hoping to just hear her lecture. The document itself is mostly useless (she can keep getting hired to speak everywhere), but it outlines the main themes of the talk.
Am I getting it right to say that she advocated CI as target language use in student-comprehended ways, and gave the example of using a story for content instead of lists of semantically-related words?
Yes, but she also showed how a vocab list can be semantic pairs (1. green 2. blue 3. under 4. over 5. hot 6 cold) or a story (1. the 2. boy 3. went 4. to 5. his 6. dad’s 7. shop) (I’m paraphrasing both of these). She kept emphasizing that all language taught needs to be meaningful to students.
That she actually did a story in Spanish that was repetitive enough and cognate-enough to be comprehensible? Did she seriously advocate against topic lists of semantically-related vocabulary?
It was a story in German, with multiple photos on each page, about two to four reps per word, and arrows to help indicate motion and where to direct attention. She did not directly state “semantically-related” was bad, nor did she directly state use of the student’s own language was bad. It just never came up (and I felt was assumed).
It looks to me like the only things she’s missing are the compelling and personalization aspects – involving students in the story and message.
Mm yeah. Personalization never came up, to my memory. I think she was saying that stories are naturally more compelling than a lot of other forms of comprehensible-input delivery. She also showed how we should wait to use songs or chants, if ever, until after lots of thought-provoking and repetitive input has been given, otherwise students will rely on the chant stuck in their head, instead of paying attention to the meaning. She showed us cartoons of Wiley Coyote and the Road Runner, with many examples of “kinetic energy” and “potential energy” (in English…she had us write what we could about these two concepts first, asked who wrote much, announced that no one was raising their hands, and then showed us these videos). The final video was a song about kinetic energy versus potential energy, and then she said “notice how I played the song last” and then she explained why it’s best if it doesn’t come first.