Dry Facts Can Perform Juicy Acts

Dry Facts Can Perform Juicy Acts In the EFL community all around the world it’s an undeniable and unpleasant reality that no matter how well-motivated you and your students are no matter how real and acute the need for learning a language may be no matter how well-equipped the language center is no matter how well-trained your instructors might be still, teaching a language as a foreign tongue in a foreign country in a classroom environment within four walls is an artificial endeavor, pure and simple. Moreover, the minute the students step out of the classroom the little language environment created in the room is left behind, lost and forgotten until the next class. Minds boggle at how lively, how attractive, how delightful and entertaining, how effective and powerful languages can be at the hands of skillful comedians, orators, actors, poets and authors while they all become utter bores, dry and irrelevant, with chalk-and-talk-addicted unimaginative, ordinary instructors in the language classrooms. Though language itself is dry and teaching it mostly boring the way you introduce it may engage even the cynical students if only you yourself believe that teaching is acting. Instructors must act to attract and impact never mind if students react without tact each act will surely get a few shells cracked “teaching is the art of changing the brain” that’s a well-known neurological fact. Acting will deliver student participation a recipe for motivation a remedy for alienation. The target is communication and retention, not full accuracy nor perfection, and, please, leave aside incessant correction, which definitely leads to disenchantment and rejection. Value student participation and production encourage interaction feed vocabulary in collocation grammar, like medicine, in the right dosage and proportion and for God’s sake, keep your chalk-and-talk at a minimum fraction. Remember, an ELT instructor is a confidence booster not an error-seeker or hand-pecking rooster. Who said ELT was an educational roller coaster? Nope. It’s more like a bread toaster, which takes care of all on the roster. Idris Esen, February, 2016, Istanbul