In the old foreign language classroom, the dynamic was very different. The teacher would only approve of the student if they did what they were supposed to do. The message was, “I will approve of you if you do what I want you to do.”
But if we release the kid to be fully in charge of their 50% of the comprehensible input (https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=4753), realizing that the class will happen as it happens, the resultant detachment of the need to impose our will on our students can become a very empowering thing for the overall quality of our instruction.
We are not in our classrooms to try to get anything. We are there to give and receive information that is fun and interesting to all involved, merely using the language as the medium for that interchange. We are there to have fun on a fully human and personal level, and not to burn out by trying to (fruitlessly) control our students’ learning.
This “get them to learn what I want them to learn” mentality is not a very receptive mentality. It is a professionally self destructive mentality. When we are busy in the moment of teaching trying to “get them to learn something”, we can’t really be aware in those moments of any possible intuitive moments – thin slicing – with our students. The lessons take on a hardened quality. They become dry and without imagination or softness. Such lessons are very hard to personalize. When the instruction is about the content and not the kids, everything is dry.
Our part in any moment of developing comprehensible input via intuitive repetitive questioning is simply to relax. If we’re there to dominate the room, make it happen, figure it all out, then we’re off the intuitive highway.
The task of teaching is to understand that the end doesn’t justify the means. Outcome based instruction, especially the Advanced Placement Exam but really all such tests, make the teacher half crazy and take them out of the area of serenity and intuition. They diminish the teacher.
Language is a process, not an end. To get into a place of intuition and serenity in our comprehensible input, we can’t worry about the test all the time, basing our instruction on the test, worrying about how we we would look if an administrator walked into our classroom.
When the language is correctly used as merely the medium of communication between the instructor and the students, and not the focus of the class, we align with Krashen. We come to deeper levels of understanding of how keeping the instruction in the conscious/analytical faculty of the student has led us to the embarrassing point we as a profession are in these days.
Krashen told me last month that the following blog entries supported his point that language learning is an unconscious process. He expressed concern that, in spite of their message, the point is often missed:
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7385
https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=7296
To repeat a point made here in the past few days, moving our instruction into one in which our students’ minds are wrapped around the message so much that they aren’t even aware that they are learning the language is a function of silence, which is a function of enforcing the rules, which is a function of active communication in the first weeks of the year with parents, deans, counselors, etc.