It is in the nature of the old language curriculums of the past to alienate most language students. Even the students who “succeed” in the old-style language classrooms don’t really learn much. They are typically motivated primarily only by the desire to get into college.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of our profession when only a few bright kids who are good at memorizing and who come from homes of privilege “succeed”. They form a bond with their teacher and thereby exclude everyone else in a kind of little social club of people who are good memorizers and who are good at testing and who are mainly white.
This happens in spite of the fact that anyone of any level of intelligence can master a language. Research isn’t needed to figure that out – just look around. Everyone speaks the language!
Reaching only “the few” didn’t seem to matter much in the past. But now, with Covid as well as the many new aggressive initiatives being put into place in education and in our society as a result of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Dante Wright, Philando Castile and a host of others, even language teachers are having to look at how social inequity raises its ugly head in their classrooms.
Via our instruction, via our assessment, via almost every aspect of the way we teach, we silently communicate messages that indoctrinate underprivileged students into their roles as “less than” in our society, while at the same time giving tacit permission – because of the way we teach -to the privileged kids to begin to assume their future controlling roles in our society.