Imagine that a mistreated dog in our midst has been rescued. Now there is hope sparkling in its grateful eyes, after all the years of neglect by those in the neighborhood who, knowing about this dog’s plight, should have prevented it. But there is always a part of the dog’s gaze that remains guarded, fearful that the abuse could begin again. We need to treat the dog in such a way that those fears finally go away for good.
So also, in the language classroom of the future, children will begin to believe that they can do it. Then the shaming will fully end, and students will finally see learning as a joyful thing, a natural thing, the way their brains actually learn languages, a part of their human birthright, and not as something tedious and boring and something that they are expected to do but cannot do.