David asked these questions –
Hi Ben,
Late last year you shared some of your books with me, and as a department we have plunged head-first into NTCI this year. It’s going well with levels I & II. But what about pre-AP/Honors/Advanced classes? How do we transition students from listening exclusively to us, to developing an ear for native speakers with various regional accents? How do we engage the Monitor to refine their rapidly developing linguistic skills, while still staying true to the CI approach? How do we encourage greater output without engaging the afffective filter?As always, thanks for being a guide and encourager to so many of us on this journey.
David
My response:
1. Has CI been able to achieve the things you describe above in the past? I don’t think so, not even close. So do we look at the failure of CI here, or maybe we should look at the real culprit – it can’t be done.
2. There has been no research or testing of ANYTHING to show that CI works at the upper levels that I know of. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m not very connected to TPRS anymore or to the targeted CI world either for that matter, so I don’t know. The problem as I see it is that the people in charge are asking regular teachers to run the equivalent of a 3:49 mile w/o any training in mud. The College Board is asking us to fly to the moon without a rocket ship.
3. The AP/Honors/Advanced classes are plugged into old assumptions that have always been categorically false. They have not been “outed” because ACTFL has yet to get a divorce from the textbook lobbies, which Krashen told me is a $1.3 billion dollar industry. Therefore, AP classes should not exist. Why?
4. We have about 1/20th of the time necessary – according to the research – to provide sufficient input to get even students of privilege in smaller suburban classes to produce authentic (not memorized) high levels of proficiency, then why do we try? This seems so obvious to me. We can’t get our entire WL teams in our buildings to long jump fifty feet either or eat 47 hot dogs in one minute.
5. So David it’s not the fault of the teachers if we can’t solve the upper level questions you raise – they are all impossible to answer if you look at them purely in terms of what the research says, of what is actually possible.
6. The idea of taking kids in a 500 hour, 4 year program (minus 1/3 of that to call roll, speak English and there’s nothing wrong with that – ACTFL’s position statement of 90% TL is all wrong) and getting them to be able to develop an ear for “various regional accents” and kick in a powerful Monitor is CRAZY.
7. And is this done with the textbook? No.
8. What the College Board is asking for they can’t have.
9. You asked how we do these AP kinds of things “and still stay true to the CI approach”. We can’t. We can’t answer those questions you ask even remotely w CI, and CI is HOW HUMAN BEINGS LEARN LANGUAGES. By extension, how could we ever get them there w the proven failure that is traditional language instruction?
10. And what about the equity piece? Let’s not go there. It is our professional shame and has been for over fifty years.
11. David it’s all about available hours. We only have 1/20, really about 1/30th of the hours we need to be able to achieve the things that the so-called leaders (are they really leading us?) at the College Board and in ACTFL claim QUITE WRONGLY are possible. But if they keep dangling that carrot in front of us and making us think we need to eat it, they get to keep their positions of leadership without really bringing us what we need to make our four year programs work in schools, and the beat goes on. They set and keep the bar too high for dark reasons that even they aren’t aware of.
12. And just to address your question about transitioning to output from all that early input. WE CAN’T. We don’t have the time needed to get to those levels of output. It’s all a big sham. We can’t do it . We don’t have enough time.