It is clear that we are not going to get any good discussion going from the members of the ACTFL Language Educators group. Every time they read something they don’t like, they disappear.
Ben Lev made this excellent point:
…the longer posts take a lot of time to digest, and don’t lend themselves to interaction. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been a lot of traffic. The silence means, I think, that people are shrugging their shoulders and saying, essentially “Fine, let them have their Krashen-y opinions, I’ve got my own.” Just a suggestion, but possibly with shorter posts there will be more breathing room for dissent, response and reflection, which is what we want….
So I think we need to ask them to expand on the things they wrote on any of the three threads there. They blink and shrink at confrontation, and Paul Sandrock is a good example of that. He is appearing more and more teflon-like every day, and that is not a good thing when the self-esteem of millions of kids is involved.
So my suggestion is to go to any thread, read for a few minutes, and invariably something we read will spark a response by us in favor of comprehensible input and against authres and all that stuff, and we can just cut and paste their sentence and ask for expansion on what they said and that will make our efforts short and sweet.
The reason I suggest this idea is that the discussion has been so one sided that it is becoming comical. I am sure that I am not the only person who would like to see someone in that group say something and defend it and so that is why I am suggesting that we ask them to expand on the things they say and leave the heavy defense and illustration of our points to the Bear and the Jackal, who, as Ben Lev says ever so correctly, are in fact unstoppable.
Find the three ACTFL threads here:
http://community.actfl.org/ACTFL/DigestViewer/?ListKey=4014d095-4c20-48e9-b1d1-0bf121261b6b