This was written today on the ACTFL list by Paul Sandrock, ACTFL Director of Education:
… ACTFL has been asked directly to respond: we do not find disagreement in the discussion around the various points being discussed….
I interpret this to be an endorsement of TCI/TPRS. But instead of trying to isolate pieces of Paul Sandrock’s comments, I refer the reader to the entire article:
http://community.actfl.org/communities/viewdiscussions/viewthread/?GroupId=439&MID=6884#bm30
Of course, at the same time Sandrock endorses our work with CI, he also endorses what traditional teachers do. He endorses both sides at the same time. (Anyone who doesn’t think that there are two sides to this argument has been living in a hole for the past twenty years.) This endorsing of both sides of the argument casts doubt on the idea that Sandrock fully understands what our position actually is. In his article he swats our position aside by lumping it in with what has been done for decades, in my opinion ineffectively.
That swatting away of our position by equating it with the current status quo would therefore reveal that the Director of Education of ACTFL dismisses our position instead of endorsing it. Read it as you wish.
Sandrock has a differing opinion of what learning a language even means. We could start an entire new thread over there by asking them, the “experts”, for a succinct definition of what fluency means. The fact is that if we speak the TL enough and have the kids read it enough, they will do more than learn about it, they will acquire it. So we want things simple, but Paul seems to want to keep them complex.
I really don’t know what Sandrock’s position is, and neither do a lot of us here in this PLC who have to this day, since Eric Herman’s original post asking for some research, not received an answer.