I was conversing in French with a student after school today. As a French 4 student soon going to France on a trip, she was concerned because she said that she had, up until this year, rarely heard the language in any of her classes up.
A natural language talent (upper 1%), she seemed to constantly to be trying to speak correctly. It was hanging her up. So I had an idea. I told her, as we spoke, that all she had to do was make herself understood. She didn’t have to be correct.
I gave her the image of a tennis player who gets the point even if the ball hits the top of the net and drops over into the opposite court. I explained that, once the ball was in the other court, the responsibility to communicate back to her lay with the other person. It seemed to help.
I wrote a blog a few days ago about how I will never tell my kids that they are wrong, and now I realize that I won’t ever tell them they have to be perfect in their speech, either. I will just tell them to keep trying, without judgement, to get the ball into the other court.
And I’m not going to force them to swing the racket, either. Any colleague that asks, “Well, then, how can the student get any practice? And how will they know if they are wrong?” will get from me a two word answer – “Oh… please…!”