My thoughts on MovieTalk change by the hour:
I just don’t like the idea of presenting incomprehensible or partially comprehensible input to my students. It would be fine if we had 24/7 to teach them but we don’t.
There is incomprehensibility that comes with MT, and that vagueness of the text to my students has been a sticking point for me. Unless we choose an extremely simple text that lasts less than a minute, the sound track of the clip we choose won’t be clear to them. This is a problem. In my view, anything we present to our students has to be 90% to 100% comprehensible input and that is a reason I avoided a real close look at MT and didn’t really do much of it since it first came onto the scene. It took too long to make MT clips comprehensible.
Then Bryan suggested today, or repeated something written hear earlier, that we look into the possibility of mixing MT with a scripting process for a story, and so I thought about that today. Specifically, I wanted to know which was better:
(a) starting a class with an MT clip and then taking it into a script and then into a reading, or
(b) the opposite, doing some backward planning from a targeted MT clip, writing a script using the targeted structures, creating a story with them, doing a reading, and then “unveiling” the MT clip to the kids at the end of the process.
I choose (b). Why? Because we do that with songs and really with everything. If we want our students to understand the language, the way comprehensible input works is that we must make sure that our students have huge amounts of reps in context (that’s what PQA is) and, only after they have had that set up work (Step 1 of TPRS), do we then have the right to move into a story and then do a reading and only then can the students be said to have acquired (not memorize) the targets used in context – it takes that long.
So this is kind of an epiphany on MT for me. MT may not represent a seismic shift as I thought earlier today, because When we just start playing a clip from the start of class, we mess up the DNA of CI which we have in the form of the Three Steps and which I am certain after testing those steps for 14 years that they house the gold for this work.
If the Three Steps have us start out with just a few structures and get tons of reps, and the students can only then create a story because we have established meaning in the way the Three Steps tell us to, then I would not start a class with an MT clip any sooner than I would start it with a story or a reading from a story. The PQA process of getting multiple reps on just a few target structures and then the PQA we do in Step 1 after that are why it’s called Step 1.
I could END a class with an MT clip from which I had chosen specific structures. But I would not show the clip until I knew that my students fully knew the words used in the clip as a result of doing each of the three steps beforehand. As mentioned, that is what we do with songs, and it works beautifully because the kids know the words and phrases in the song first.
So in answer to my own question posed earlier about what MT even is, I just answered it for myself, for this evening anyway. And in doing so, I defined for myself what it is not – it is not a long discussion where five to ten minutes of a film is played and then I stop the film and talk about it in general terms. Doing that is going to throw off a lot of my (largely unmotivated) kids. This even includes my AP students, whose motivation is usually only that it “looks good for college”, and who, with only three or four hundred hours of CI under their belts, are no more ready to read and understand a fast text from a movie in the TL than they are ready to fly to the moon, in spite of what some of those top rung ACTFL “immersion” experts might claim they do in their classes.
The sole exception to my reserve about starting a class with MT, of course, would come in the form of using MT to review previous vocabulary, and that again, would require me to choose a text that would be 90% to 100% comprehensible to them, and for a level 1 class that would have to be a really simple movie clip.