The Accelerated Integrative Method - Year One

At the end of the summer of 2012, I went with a group of my colleagues to Victoria, BC, to learn about the Accelerated Integrative method. I was not enthused, as I'd seen demonstrations of the method and to me it seemed rather infantile, controlling and difficult to orchestrate.

By way of description, the AIM utilizes what it describes as "pared-down language", "pleasant repetition" (the sound of that still smacks of mind-control to me) and inductive gestural markers for parts of speech. Students will learn around 400 words during the first quarter, each of which has a gesture that is marked as a part of speech. 

I made these videos for my students so that they could practice, but most of their practice occurs in the classroom. Some of them got really gung-ho about practicing, and they have consistently had amazing results. I don't know if you can see the advantage of this, but just imagine having a kinesthetic prompt that enables you to elicit the desired language from a student without explaining what it is that he/she is doing. All of a sudden, you're able to teach a student to say all kinds of things. My students are often making jokes in the class, and catching the punchlines only as they're finishing their sentences. 

Giving instructions in the target language is also much easier, because instead of just listening to the instructions, all of the students are, in some sense, giving them. The same thing can be done through reading, of course, but the sticky bit is that students already have a logic for pronouncing the roman alphabet, and re-coding that is not a simple thing. However, once students have learned the language orally, they are able to map it onto the written words without much difficulty.

These are some of the strengths of this method. It also has its weaknesses, especially articulated in the current educational climate. Next up: an argument for teaching all students grammar in their native language.