To attempt to teach listening and reading using activities that are essentially of the conscious mind is folly. Reading activities that keep the reader in the conscious mind fail to put the mind’s focus on the message.
It is the very nature of the conscious mind to want to keep everything in its domain of analysis of language. The language teacher who attained dominance in the college classroom via pure analysis of language, verb forms and the like runs off to their first secondary school teaching job like the Tarot fool.
It cannot be. 96% of their students don’t care about conscious analysis of language. Those kids want to play with language, dance to the music, laugh and play, absorbing language that way.
The teacher wins, of course. Most of the kids respond by settling into the passive aggressive mode that they use in their other classes for a year or two and then quitting.
It is really nobody’s fault. The language activity facilitator went into his first classroom with the best of intentions, but, sadly, managed to reach only the few, largely shutting down the brain of most of his students.
That’s because the brain, like any computer, shuts down, goes to sleep, if it is not required, and, since we learn languages unconsciously, and the teacher is not actually teaching but faciltating language activities, there are no gains.
Such language activity facilitators are like children playing with rockets instead of actually getting in a real one and blasting off. That’s why we can say that any class in which the instructor uses the language, however furtive the attempt, are superior to classes in which English is used as the basic mode of instruction.