If your truth is connected to making them conjugate verbs and memorize lists, they sense that somewhere in what you are presenting to them, on some level somewhere, they are being shamed. Yes, doing those activities in your classroom is shaming. Why?
Because it destroys what real language is. It scatters what real language is. It twists what real language is. It breaks apart what real language is. It makes the students try to grasp pieces, shrapnel, of the language that they are studying, and if they can’t grab the metal shards of verb forms and isolated words flying by them, they feel, incorrectly, that they are stupid. And the teacher, unconscionably, even tells them they can’t learn a language. That is shaming behavior by an adult on a child.
All students can learn a language. They just can’t catch schrapnel flying by them. They can’t catch exploding grenades in the form of tests and discrete item testing and language that is mixed with L1 and page 43 in the book, nor can they grasp language that isn’t comprehensible to them because it is too fast and they aren’t being given enough reps.
Comprehensible input, when presented to the kids in the form of lighthearted stories and banter in the target language, instead of in the form of heavy shards of shrapnel that wound them, provides to the kids a new truth, and the hope and inner conviction after the first month of success that they in fact CAN learn a language. They CAN!
This is a new truth in the foreign language classrooms of American schools. I can go with that. In fact, I AM going with that. Like Jeff and all of us, I used to shame them, but not any more. I am no longer exploding shrapnel in my kid’s faces.
I am presenting to them language that is meaningful, lighthearted, and interesting, langauge that bonds us, language that reflects Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, where language is actually learned. I am getting their minds focused on the message and not the medium for its delivery.
Switching our students focus from the language to the message kicks in a neurology far more complex, infinitely more complex, than anything I could do by stubbornly using cognition and analysis to teach the language. When I get the whole thing to unconscious for them, I engage them in a way that I could never have imagined before I heard about stories.
My students sense my truth.