There is a lot of negative energy pulling us back to the textbook, but it will be short-lived. Don’t get fooled. The language teachers of the future will teach from their hearts and not their minds, since it is pretty clear right now that the old ways of teaching languages are in their death throes.
The parable below from Maulana Rumi’s Masnavi expresses what is happening. It shows how we have been led astray in our profession to think, for decades now, that teaching a language is all about getting our kids to think about how the language is built rather than just focusing on the message.
No blame. Most of us never really understood the research that says – and let’s say it again – that learning a language is all about focusing on the message and allowing the unconscious mind to do the actual acquisition, without us having to even think at all! It’s so well-designed that we acquire the language effortlessly (Krashen) during sleep after merely having been exposed to it.
Here’s Rumi’s parable that describes our situation:
The cub of a tiger happened to be reared amongst a flock of sheep. As the cub grew up, it developed all the traits of the sheep and grazed and bleated like them, so that it never thought of itself as anything different from the sheep. One day, however, a tiger from the jungle approached the one from the flock and said to him, “Do you know that you are a tiger like me and not one of the sheep?” Thereafter he coaxed the strayed tiger to look at its image in a rivulet nearby, and succeeded in enlightening it as to its true nature.
So also, too many of us have allowed ourselves to identify with the sheep who use the textbook. On some level in our deeper minds, we knew it was not the way, but we didn’t know what to do. Again, no blame. But now, we know the way – all we have to do is teach in alignment with the research that says that focusing on the form of the language is nothing more than a tremendous waste of time.
It is through comprehensible input and focusing on the message that people acquire languages. What more do we need to know? We forgot. But now we are remembering.