I got this question today:
…I am interested in seeing CI activities and or videos for upper levels. I teach Spanish III and AP. I am somewhat familiar with CI/TPRS for lower levels and am always working to incorporate these into my upper level classes. However, we have a fairly traditional program and our upper level students need to be producing in the language. Can you point me in any good directions….
I responded:
Input is input and in my opinion, having taught 7th grade through AP French using CI, I find that an AP French class that has not had sufficient CI cannot pass the exam, except for those few rock star kids. Thus in my opinion if a child has heard only 50 – 100 hours of comprehensible input (less than half of instructional minutes in a two year period) and then is in AP French, good luck with that.
(It happens – once I inherited a group of seniors in AP French who had done worksheets for three years. Though intelligent, some were gifted, the lack of input resulted in them being behind my French 1 kids by mid year for the reason that, regardless of their age, they had simply not heard or read enough language and didn’t at that level even know how to play the CI game in class and it was such a waste, poor kids. They also hated French.)
Thus to ask kids in a traditional program to be able to output without the a huge amount of hours – far beyond what we have; at least 1,000 (it is not about anything but time) – then failure will be the result no matter how talented the teacher is. (It’s not about the talent of the teacher – that’s our ego talking, as much as the amount of CI the kids receive.) To answer your question, then, and I say this with deep respect because I also thought that I could speed up output with smart upper level kids, in my view it is impossible to differentiate between upper level and lower level CI. CI is just CI and the more you get above 10,000 hours of auditory input, the closer the kids approach command of speech in the L2, in what is a completely natural and unconscious process that is all arranged in the deeper mind after all the input, night after night in sleep.
In my view, it is completely wrong and a national pipe dream born in ignorance when AP teachers fail to create strong articulation paths with the lower level teachers to the tune of 98% use of interesting and meaningful input through all four levels. In that case, you will easily have scores of 3 and 4. But in a traditional program there is no such thing as some kind of technique someone invents to get the desired results on the AP exam. That is impossible and the sad thing is (really sad actually) that some teachers are so talented and they say, “OK well these worksheet trained kids know next to nothing but if I work hard with them I can get them up to speed.” That will never happen and those teachers show a tendency to burn out trying to pull off such a feat. It happens all the time. It happened to me. All you have to do is look at the AP teacher’s face. You can see that they are trying to do something impossible due to the lack of a true CI articulation path going back to level 1.
I would add and sorry for the caps but I just wrote and cut and pasted this to someone in Europe today who was looking to learn how to speak English faster, asking was there a course using TPRS/CI somewhere in Europe to get them speaking better and faster that I knew about and I said, “YOU DON’T NEED TO PRACTICE SPEAKING TO GET BETTER AT SPEAKING. WE HAVE RESEARCH ON THIS I WON’T GO INTO, JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. YOU GET BETTER AT SPEAKING BY LISTENING AND READING BUT IT TAKES A LONG TIME – MANY THOUSANDS – NOT HUNDREDS – HOURS. IT IS A PROCESS THAT CAN’T BE SPED UP.”
My deepest apologies if I offend on this point, but again I have to be true to my own 37 years in this profession – everything I have learned about output is summed up in one sentence – output can’t be rushed via any cool techniques, CI or otherwise. High AP scores come from massive amounts of auditory and reading input. I had a super intelligent kid once in French 1 and 2 only who had 69/70 questions on the National French Exam and was not wrong on that one question because the question was wrong and he was the only person in the U.S. that year, including the native speaker editors, to see that. (The mistake was related to content, and of course not to the French.) When I confronted AATF they acknowledged the error but refused to change his score. The reason I say that is because he also got a 4 on the AP French exam after two years BUT he was a rare case and heard the language ALL THE TIME in French 1 and 2. Sorry about the ramble, but if the question is how to do CI at upper levels, then the answer is it can’t be done unless it was done at 98% good quality and consistent CI in the lower levels.
In summary, we can’t think our way to higher AP scores. We either deliver the time in the language or we don’t. It’s kind of like asking a Tour de France guy to win that race with maybe a total of 75 miles of intense training. They do 75 miles for breakfast. They literally need tens of thousands of riding to even get into that level of race.