The Forgetting Hypothesis

The following is taken from a recent presentation "How to Put Latin in the Ears of Your Students (When You Don't Know How to)," which I co-delivered at the American Classical League Summer Institute.

One of Krashen's key components of Comprehensible Input is that language acquisition occurs when messages are not only understandable but are also compelling in nature. We wish to listen to messages which are compelling to us. If the message (regardless of whether it involves targeted or non-targeted vocabulary) is compelling, then language becomes secondary, i.e. students "forget" that it is another language due to their focus and interest on the message itself. Krashen writes:

In fact, the "forgetting hypothesis" requires that the messages not only be interesting but also compelling, with all attention focused on the message to such an extent that thoughts of anxiety do not occur...When you get compelling input, you acquire whether you are interested in improving or not.

In a CI classroom, I think that for us teachers, delivering comprehensible messages becomes so much of a focus that we forget to deliver compelling messages. And to be honest, delivering compelling messages is difficult: what is compelling for one student is completely boring to another. Some students love PQAs and being asked about their lives, while others hate the attention. Some students love culture discussion in the target language, yet others find it boring. Some students really enjoy story asking/story listening, while others tune out.

As Carol Gaab always says, "The brain craves novelty," and she is completely correct. As CI teachers, we need to be mindful of this and to switch up activities in order to keep the compelling factor going. Rachel Ash's statement "We want repetitions without being repetitive" rings true about the need to keep things compelling in our classroom. The key is to vary activities so that the slower processors get in the necessary repetitions, while the faster processors get the novelty of a new activity in order to avoid boredom. This also allows for you as the teacher to appeal to as many students who have varied degrees of interest in a topic. 

Here are some examples of activities which I have implemented in class where I have seen "the forgetting hypothesis" occur, i.e., students focused more on the task/activity due to interest and the language became secondary due to the task's compelling nature:

• PQAs - Personalized Questions and Answers. Luke Henderson, a Latin colleague in California, once said to me, "Students want to talk about two things: themselves and money. And since we are not going to talk about money, we are going to talk about them."
• Movie Talks - I could base my entire curriculum on Movie Talks. Everyone loves a good story, and a good movie talk will achieve that. I used to struggle with doing movie talks, because I had never experienced one as a student. It was not until 2016 when I saw Katya Paulova demonstrate one using a Budweiser commercial involving a puppy and a horse that I understood how to do one properly. Katya demonstrated it in Russian, but I was so engrossed in this commercial that I did not really think about her speaking in Russian. Katya says that the best movie talks are those which appeal to the emotions. I also feel that there needs to be some kind of twist at the end of the clip which students did not see coming - I see this as a "reward" for those students who hate sitting through movie talks.
• Optical Illusions/This Day in History - These are quick 5-minute activities where students get so focused on the task that they want to know the answer. At the same time, overuse of these can destroy the novelty.
• Find the Disney/Pixar Character

Whenever I am observed, I love it if I am doing one of these activities, because even the observer becomes engaged in the activity. 

What activities have you used which leads to students to "forgetting" about the language?