We have no business ruining this great unconscious process of language creation simply because we want to be in the kitchen making the food. I say to all of us, “Get out of the kitchen! We are disturbing the chef, who is really shy and will retire from the kitchen if we barge in and start to slice and dice and overcook his food, elbowing him out, elbowing out the natural with boring instruction that is not natural. Haven’t we messed things up pretty good by now?
We have by trying far too hard now for far too many decades to turn our classrooms into language kitchens.
How do I know this to be true? It is because many of the kids visibly hate the food that we force on them during class when delivered to their conscious minds in the unappetizing ways we have invented. They can’t digest that kind of instruction. Some vomit it onto the test page, usually just enough to pass the course. Some tape their mouths shut. A few big eaters eat everything and we tell them how great they are, because they resemble us when we were in school. But even those kids never learn the language, not authentically.