How well should students be able to write in the L2+ after 300 hrs of class? It depends what they do. The more time they spend listening to and reading comprehensible input, the better a grasp of the L2+ they will have, and that, depending on the individual, will enable them to write and speak a bunch.
If, on the other hand, they do practice dialogues, grammar worksheets and so on, they won’t do as well as kids who get lots of C.I.
Today, I’m sharing my 3rd year Spanish student Gursher’s final story. He did this in 50 min, without notes or dictionary. He has never seen a worksheet and he couldn’t tell you what a verb conjugation or boot verbs are. He has never “reflected on his learning,” or done “goal setting” for Spanish, or revised a Spanish portfolio, or any other conscious-learning blather. All he has ever gotten was lots of C.I.
Most interestingly, although he was in Spanish 3, I never gave him any Spanish-3–specific work. He just hung out, did PQA and stories and Movietalks and whatever random babbling I managed, along with the 2s. So what, exactly, did he “learn”?
What he learned was, he got way better at Spanish. You will note teacher-geek qualities such as subj-verb and adjective agreement etc. And he got better at it just by being in class. This is something Blaine and Von Ray noticed some years ago: the greatest beneficiaries of mixed-level classes are the advanced kids, who seem to soak up “better grammar” (and some vocab from whatever they are reading that the lower-level kids aren’t reading).
This is the final writing assignment. Kids had 50 min. No notes, no dictionary. We will let the evidence for C.I.’s effectiveness speak for itself.
t.p.r.s. q&a 