So also is it true that, in our language classrooms, no matter how much we put our students through their paces in the form of circled and targeted “workouts”, we will not see the kinds of gains that we wish to see unless we create in our students a desire to want to be in our classrooms.
How do we do that? It is done in two ways. First, we do it by building community in our classrooms. Only when we have achieved a strong sense of community in our classrooms, classrooms that are characterized by trust and a certain feeling that we are going to have fun in class that day, can our classrooms become places where our students want to be.
Second, we must make the instruction that we offer our students interesting. What does it mean “interesting”? In my mind it means that the students want to know what happens. That is my definition of interesting. Dr. Krashen has said:
…it is very hard to create compelling messages when the hidden agenda is the relative clause….
