When we give our students a reason to be happy in our classrooms, instead of placing them somewhere on an arbitrary scale of how “good” they are at the language compared to other students, we do it right. We place the needs of children to be an accepted part of a vibrant language sharing community over our own needs to label them in terms of what they can or cannot do with the language as a result of our instruction.
The primary needs that our students have, to be acknowledged as important to the group, are needs of the heart, of inclusion. The secondary “academic” needs are needs that many of the kids don’t even want, because they spend much of their childhoods immersed in the things of the mind, namely screens.
Kids want love. They want to be acknowledged for what they can do, not for what they can’t do. In the Invisibles it all starts from drawings. There really is no “academic” need in foreign language education, not if you know the research. It’s a bogus idea.
Human beings are living proof that academic analysis is not needed to learn a foreign language. People just need to hear it enough, and it helps if they want to hear it. So, if we build community in our language classrooms, that’s plenty. So, give love and approval and love their drawings and watch your own experience of your job change. That’s what happened to me.
For more general information on quick quizzes, see Supplement 11 in the Supplements book.
