Every month, our church members get a partner letter from the founder when he expounds a little bit more on what the Lord shares with him for the ministry and everyday life. For August, I'm not sure why it took me so long to open my mail (I'm not really a mail fan, ya'll, seriously - not paper snail mail or e-mail). But today, I woke up early for the weekend (7 a.m.) and wanted to get some reading done.
For whatever reason, my mind always takes a Biblical principle and relates it to the classroom - my classroom to be quite specific. I teach high schoolers to acquire Spanish and we use a ton of technology to excite and engage each other in the process.
Believers talk a lot about faith but I'm not sure if we've learned how to really access it. You see, we all were not necessarily born with it, but we were given it once we popped out and figured out we had an imagination. We've each received a measure of faith. (Romans 12:3) That means we each can make it grow or not, depending on what we do with our faith, more specifically, according to Romans 10:17, we increase in faith by what we hear.
How does this relate to my world language classroom and why did I revel in this Aha! moment earlier? It's because faith builds confidence! The more you hear it, see it, read it, witness it, experience it, the more you understand it, get it and naturally walk in it! This is what is considered acquisition (something happening subconsciously and without forced effort) versus learning (a conscious effort to pay attention to structures). And so, in an acquisition-driven language environment, the same principle holds true for our students. They must constantly hear (read, see, witness in context, experience culture comparisons and differences) in the target language in order to receive faith - the confidence to actually spit it back out in meaningful and understandable context!
This morning's epiphany helped me better understand the purpose behind what we all want to happen in our classrooms: the engagement, the motivation, the understanding, the desire to openly share and communicate. It all comes and lines up when our students are confident about what they have acquired through your constant OUTpouring of INput!
For this reason, we do storytelling, story listening, read alouds, music listening to lyrics, clip chats and/or movie talks. In order to maintain a 90% classroom in the target language, our students must interact daily with one or more of these tasks to continually receive input, so that when we do decide to have story asking (yes, it is different from story listening and I recently realized that too!) or after we just finished a special person interview, we don't get blank stares and glossy eyes, instead we get real words and gestures in return, smiling faces and the like.
It's the FAITH for me! It's a confidence booster. It's a sentence starter, builder and completer! After I've done all I know to do with pouring the language into my students, all I'll have to do is sit back and watch them (hear them, see them) communicate with me everything their hearts can muster in the target language!
Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word! Be sure to jump into a scripture today. Hold on to it and watch your confidence sky rocket! 🤙🏾
#notjustaclassroomblog
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