John Keats, in his Letter to John Taylor, 27th Febrary 1818, stated:
…if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all….
This line expresses how I feel about language learning. What we do in instructing our students should not be a primarily conscious thing, no more than a tree can consciously push out leaves, or a fetus become a baby by the conscious effort of the mother, no more than the stars can align themselves by sheer effort of will.
Once I fully learn that my classes need not be a result of my hard conscious effort to make the CI interesting, but rather a natural natural outcome of the beauty of human speech created together, I will have learned something of the poetry of what comprehension based teaching is all about.
For…if language comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all….