Salvete omnes! I am absolutely reeling from a vibrant, informative, and joyous ACL Institute. I was able to catch up with old friends, make some new ones, and, of course, attend some great sessions. Most notable were Kevin Ballestrini's presentation on designing courses with transfer goals to ensure vertical alignment and a coherent endgoal for learners; Lindsay Sears' talk on best practices in assessment; and a lecture by Panayotes Dakouras on teaching Roman history through numismatics.
In addition to attending sessions, I presented on two topics. I chose MovieTalks for my first because it is what people most express confusion or apprehension about using in class. I've even given impromptu demos at various conferences or workshops in between sessions since colleagues asked to see how I use them!
As a practitioner of the "3 C's" of CI, I find MovieTalks to be an excellent way to leverage student engagement to get optimal language acquisition. Selecting a compelling video clip, talking about it in a comprehensible way, and doing so in a low-stakes environment in which students feel cared for (thereby lowering their affective filters), will help them all acquire language.
Personally, I like to use movie talks with words students can easily confuse (I do one with my 7th graders who use Cambridge Latin Course that revolves around 'canis,' 'cibum,' 'coquit,' and 'cenat'), or idiomatic expressions that are harder for students to internalize ('consilium capit,' or 'poenas dare' for example).
They are also a great way to include new cases of nouns in a low stakes way that doesn't involve the memorization of paradigms. I use a MovieTalk to introduce the dative case (nom + acc + dat + verb). That's a long, syntactically complex sentence for novice learners, but MovieTalks give learners a concrete visual context in which to see how the language is working. You can get in lots of repetitions, and by pausing the video and pointing to each aspect of the sentence as you say it, students can begin internalizing this syntax.
This presentation also includes follow-up activities you can do with MovieTalks to get more mileage out of them. Personally, I embed mine into larger Google Slides presentations that target certain things (with CLC-based instruction, the MovieTalk often allows us to launch into a reading from the textbook, whereas younger learners may be asked to do a quickwrite, partner retell, or answer questions about what they just saw).
I hope you find my presentation useful! Let me know if you have any questions!
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