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I got behind on my meeting oulines, so sent briefer versions by email. Here is the one for this meeting:Good evening CBI folks,
Thanks for all that energy and discussion yesterday. We made a lot of progress in defining those projects and the differences among them.
Tomorrow and probably many further meetings will have considerable similarity: talking out the projects, sometimes trying them out as we did with Spanish ballet. I'm attaching the complete versions of the Spanish makeup + theater production + CBI-style literature project and of the French bicycle tour business one.
We probably need more discussion about assessment, and we haven't talked much about reading and listening skills.
At the risk of overdoing the topic, I may bring in some more SpeakEasy examples to illustrate those important points about not overestimating student's ability and not underestimating the time CBi activities need.
Now I need to come up with the customary teaser. Let's see, hmmm…
Got it! Might not be very good, but it's what I've got, and I need some time this evening to work on that Albanian software so it will be up on the grant-proposal website in case the proposal reviewers have now received our stuff.
Let's say that your language department wants to keep its profile high beyond the borders of the department - so often we language folk are overlooked. Now we've talked a lot about CBI with sustainability and environmentalism as the C. But what if the glamour topic is "internationalization"? Can't just do another "Foods [Dances, Costumes] of the World" festival. That's old hat, and internationalization is much more serious than that. It's war, and peace, and ethnic strife and such.
So you maybe hit on the idea of "Conflict Resolution" with the internationalization flavor. A quick glance at the proficiency guidelines, however, tells us that it's not going to work if you try the "Model United Nations" idea for your two-week module. Any better ideas? You see, conflict resolution involves the high-level functions of persuading, counseling, hypothesizing, and representing the views of others, but the full-force language to do that is found only at a level (ILR 4, well up into ACTFL Superior) where we just have many students, even in our grad-level language programs. I'm an ILR 4 in German - maybe, and if I am, it's not a strong 4.
Pleasant conflict-free dreams!
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