Think about the gut reaction that a child must have to going into a language classroom and being forced to memorize a long list of words that she is not particularly interested in memorizing except to get a grade on a test.
Now think how she must feel when she is asked to write or say something in the language before she is ready (i.e. hasn’t heard enough comprehensible input at that point in her career as a language student).
It’s not fair to her. It’s not fair to her because she is being force-fed boring food. There is a parallel there between the SAD (Standard American Diet) and the SWTL (Standard Way of Teaching Languages). Both are largely unpalatable and offer low levels of enjoyment, of pleasure.*
She rebels. She withdraws. Force never works. Rather, we must learn how to coax her out of her shell, her “defiance”, to the same inner world to which she has retreated in so many of her other classes in order to just feel safe.
We think of language education as something that we are in charge of and must direct and control and plan out when the research says that all our students need is comprehensible input because comprehensible input is how people learn languages. No planning is needed to teach a good language class, unless of course you are forced to by an outmoded and outdated curriculum. Think about that!
Are we going to align with the research and thus heal our profession or not? Are we going to learn to teach languages as an exhilarating game involving laughter and fun or not? Are we ever going to see the day when our students return to us and are seen by us as real people?
Are we ever going to be able to see and take delight in how smart and creative and talented our students really are so that the nightmare of distance between us finally disappears?
Maybe we should borrow from the job description of healers to end the nightmare that our profession has been having for so long, so many achingly long years of separation and distance caused by us, not our students. (They are not lazy; they are blocked.)
Maybe we can heal our profession by healing our relationships with our kids. The only way to do that is to teach in ways that engage them.
*http://sdkrashen.com/content/articles/1994_the_pleasure_hypothesis.pdf