When we teach robotically, we get robot-like responses. But when we teach from our hearts, using body and heart-centered activities that reach the oft-closed hearts of our students, we get responses from their hearts.
Language instruction REQUIRES the involvement of the heart. When it is all caught up in the head, no language is being acquired.
If you are not familiar with Lev Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development”, search it. Basically, it means, in my view, that we figure out ways to build on their natural creative strengths by being a strong loving adult near them and providing them with activities that enable them to build on what they know already. This “drawing out” – done in the target language – of a sense of reciprocality and play and exploration and inquiry and spontaneity (vs. memorization, which is none of those things) should be the goal of our instruction.
There is such creative strength built into their minds, but we have to be there to draw those strengths out, to coax them forward, and not allow them, by left-brain robotic analysis of language as a machine, to be bored out of their minds.
If you want to see the difference, go down a high school WL wing and walk into a classroom. If you see a kind of distant, disengaged, look in the students’ eyes, that teacher is playing off their instruction as valid but, without a Zone of Proximal Development working there, the instruction is not valid. It is invalid and a waste of time and money and ends up having a more deleterious effect on the child than had they never taken the class.
The short way to say it is if there is no laughter or sense of mirth or lighthearted play in the classroom, then nothing is happening. Air is being breathed and that’s about it. Teachers who have not explored that side of their teaching have not explored what is the key factor in language instruction – it’s humanness and sense of play that describes real human interaction, and separates our communication from our robot friends’ worksheets.
The most critical need right now in our profession is not how to get better gains in proficiency, it’s how to reach our students. Proficiency follows community building and not vice versa.