A repost from 2008:
People don’t get that unpredictable words come up in class. They don’t trust that ideas will occur naturally during the conversation, and they try to be in control of the class, so that they can teach certain words. Thus, the natural flow and emergence of the content of a story is strangled by planning and the need to meet the demands of the “curriculum”. This results in boredom. Trust is a big word in our work. And we all know that the curriculum is the language. To repeat: the curriculum is the language. One more time: the curriculum is not a list of some sort (high frequency verb lists, thematic units, semantic sets, etc.)
Do you know what is crazy? People who target parts of the language instead of teaching it as a whole. Such people don’t trust much. They don’t believe that the words will come up in a natural way in normal discussion in class. But how could they not? Does it not make sense that if you speak in the TL all class, you will end up using a lot of words in the language, and that your students might just acquire the language if you spoke to them in the TL long enough? Too simple?