For us, it’s not about teaching the kids the language as much as providing them with a good experience. When they enjoy the class, when it seems effortless to them, because we work so hard at making our instruction comprehensible, the kids want to go on to higher and higher levels.
We make it so that they want to spend more time, another year, maybe more, enjoying figuring out what they hear and read. Soon, something switches in their brains and they are speaking and writing. It’s all very natural.
When we are unnatural, when we remove the focus of our students away from the natural joyfulness that lives, mostly unnoticed*, in words, when we remove their focus away from the fun of a story or from the dignity and joy that there is in being spoken about by classmates in a fun and uplifting way, and when we focus rather on the importance of learning how to spell verbs, and how serious it all is, with no personalized or whole brain instruction present, we lose them.
This all seems kind of obvious to me. Let’s just enjoy our students by talking about them slowly and in lighthearted ways about things that are interesting and meaningful to them. Let’s allow ourselves to laugh a bit in our work. It’s permitted, and now more than every, with the change happening, and with ACTFL getting a bit of a actual backbone that is not mere posturing*.
*although I sense that they may get it mentally but not in their bodies, where it happens.