The Pure Land is a place where quietude in the classroom rules over noise, where pauses occur more often than words, where the timbre and tone of the instructor’s voice are characterized by calmness and kindness, and where the communication with the students is unusually heightened.
For this, the language must be made attractive and the room must be emptied of pretense. It must invite curiosity. Think of quiet evenings around a fire, soft voices, and mystery. We don’t yell the story.
The Pure Land is where meaning and sound converge in happiness. It is where a gentle wind blows authentic acquisition into the students’ minds, bringing real appreciation for the language, and sweetening the experience for all lucky enough to be in the room when the teacher expertly circles the story into the Pure Land.
When the students are in the Pure Land, they sense it, but they don’t say anything about it.
When we go to the Pure Land, we leave the hustle and bustle of busily delivering our CI product to the CI town and we go out into the fields. There, we don’t deliver our instruction by truck. We don’t try to “deliver” our instruction at all, but rather we slip into a painting of La Vie Champêtre by an artist like Renoir or Sisley – we just hang out with our students in the TL.
We get to the Pure Land in class only because we have gotten sufficient repetitions on the targets in our projected story that the students have command over them and thus can became a part of this very rare and authentic kind of communication with their instructor in the target language.