This morning Robert sent in a coda to his Scope and Sequence articles:
Since writing my response to my administrator, I have thought of another reason that some students do not speak: the impatience of the teacher.
We as teachers do not give students sufficient time to process before we either supply an answer or go on. We know the language, so we can concentrate on meaning and formulating an answer; these will take very little time at all, in fact we may already have the answer formulated before we ask the question. A student, however, must do the following:
1. Make sense of these strange sounds, which involves – among other things – breaking up a flow of sound into recognizable units (words/structures)
2. Create meaning from these now recognizable units
3. Understand the message or question
4. Figure out if he or she is capable of responding (i.e. knows the answer or can comment on the message)
5. Access the words and structures in the target language to formulate a response
6. Put the words and structures together into a coherent (to the student) utterance
7. Use the entire vocal mechanism to produce a series of sounds that often require new ways of using the vocal mechanism and seem “unnatural”
Often a student has reached point 3 or 4, perhaps even 5 or 6 (or possibly is still on 2), when the teacher grows impatient and supplies an answer or simply moves on. The student then thinks, “Why should I even try to answer?” At this point we begin to “lose” them – and it is all because of our own impatience, not their laziness; they weren’t being lazy at all. Perhaps an analogy helps illustrate this. We ask a child to open the door. First the child needs to locate the door, then go to the door. Perhaps the door is rather large, and the child has difficulty with it (reaching the latch, turning the key, etc.). We know that the child is capable of opening the door. Do we encourage the child in the endeavor, or do we become impatient and go open the door ourselves? If we do the latter, is it any wonder that the child doesn’t move the next time we say, “Open the door, please”? We’ve already demonstrated quite effectively that we consider the child incapable of performing the task, so why should he or she take on certain failure?
I do not believe that most students are intrinsically lazy, but they are often unmotivated by our reward system, in survival mode or hiding behind defense mechanisms. Those are issues that require solutions other than “pushing” (read: attacking) students.