Classrooms and the uses and limitations of formal teaching.
I cannot help feeling sometimes that classrooms and formal teaching -styles are not very effective vehicles for the learning of languages or anything else. Classrooms suffer from some very obvious limitations. They do not and cannot offer the same natural profusion of daily occurrences that life in the streets outside offer. This is both a limitation and a strength. Because of their apparent sensory monotony, they make it possible to focus on only one or several things at a time. They are, at best 'sheltered environments' and offer opportunities not only for 'uninhibited' but also for sheltered practice.
If language-teaching fails because it is limited by some of these natural 'sheltered' constraints, then so does any other form of teaching in any other classroom for any other subject. I believe - intuitively believe - that good teachers have never succeeded in teaching well by ignoring the fact that they are teaching in classrooms. In a way, good teachers are like good actors. I say 'in a way' because I don't want in any way to confuse good teaching with good acting. There are certain similarities but there are also enormous differences and I am -after almost forty years of teaching -enormously ware of the differences. So I don't want to leave you with the impression that I am confusing in any way these two things. What, however, is the one most obvious way in which they are similar?