When we read poetry, it’s not the words that set us dreaming. It’s the images, thoughts and feelings that they convey. When we listen to music, it isn’t the individual notes that transport us into another place. It’s the overall feeling of the totality of sound that releases our imaginations.
So also, when we listen to a language that we don’t know, it shouldn’t be drudgery to us. Studying the language should not focus on the way verbs are spelled, or on other individual words, or on the way the accents go, or on the rules that govern the language.
Instead, when we listen to a language, it should make us happy. It should make us want to listen more. We should get a happy feeling of engagement with the instructor when we listen to the language, and that happy feeling should be the result of no conscious effort on our part.
So, our goal as second language teachers should be to teach them in a way that reflects the way our students learned their first language – effortlessly and unconsciously. We should continually direct the attention of our students to the meaning of what is being said, so that the incidental sounds – verbs an nouns and whatnot – that they heard while their minds were focused on the meaning of what was being said in our classes that day are cemented into the language system being built daily in their unconscious minds. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
We want to to get our kids solely focused on the message and not the words that we say in class. When they are focused on the message and understand, it makes them happy. When they are focused on the words, which resemble parts of cars, ball bearings and trinkets and other parts of things, it is not fun for them and they don’t want to do it.
Why focus on the parts of the machine, which, taken individually, are kind of boring, when your students can focus on the beautiful machine that is the result of the artistic placing together of those parts into something that is whole and something that reflects the dignity of human life. I soon get bored looking at the fender of a car, but the car in its totality is much more interesting to watch when it is functioning optimally.
Making the kids focus on the words is like asking them to focus myopically on the individual grains of sand on a beach. The grains of sand pretty much all look alike and looking at them all day would get boring after a while. However, if we encourage our students to focus on the beauty of the beach itself, the way it curves down the shoreline, the way it reflects the light of the sun in so many different ways, the way it creates its own music with the sea, then these things are interesting to children. They want to feel and experience the poetry of expression of the natural world, and language is very much a part of the natural world and of God’s creation.
To accomplish this, to get our students focused on the language and not the words, we speak very slowly, we stay in bounds, we check for understanding to an extreme degree and we try to create a lesson that more resembles poetry or music, a lesson that uplifts. Both poetry and music are made from words, but they create a lot more than words when they are sympathetically juxtaposed with each other. When children are taught language in this way, experiencing the beach and not just the sand, they are shown another beautiful thing that is there in life, and they can be happier.
We can create, in our comprehension based classes, something that resembles poetry or music! We don’t need to create instruction that appeals only to the left hemisphere of the brain. We thought we did once, but we were wrong and we can change. We just need to keep our focus on grammar (correctly spoken language), and we can model correct grammar by co-creating interesting langauge with our kids.
To be able to really focus on grammar, we just have to remember to not focus so much on the vocabulary (not look so much at all the grains of sand on the beach). The vocabulary will take care of itself if we speak the language enough. Some of us feel better in targeting our speech to the 200 most common words in the language, which are listed on the DPS website, and that is fine. But we do need to remember to shelter vocabulary, and make it a skill and add it to the others that we already have like slow, staying in bounds, and checking for understanding.
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