Trench Mouth

The 2026-27 academic year is upon us.

Planning for another year in the trenches is daunting. Many of us will get trench mouth, which is a term few would understand but us who know what it means: it’s when you talk and they don’t listen, but you can’t just walk out of your classroom because you need a job. Although many of us know exactly what it feels like to just want to stroll out of our classrooms and never return…

Trench mouth happens most often to language teachers who do lots of planning. We think - quite mistakenly - that teaching a language requires lots of planning. For most subjects, it’s true. But it’s not true in our field of language instruction if you want to align your instruction with the research about how people actually acquire languages.

Now, if your intention professionally is to keep your kids sedated with few classroom management problems this year, then carry on as usual in this new year. It’s going to happen in 99% of American WL classrooms this year anyway, so join the crowd… But if you want excited, engaged kids, then read on…

I repeat: If you want to align your instruction with the research about how people actually acquire languages, then stop with all the planning! You’re being brainwashed by older colleagues down the hallway who still think that our jobs require a lot of work and nervousness and stress. God bless them, but they are wrong about that…

Do your school districts pay you extra for all that time spent away from your loved ones while you frenetically plan each year for the next day’s instruction, day after day, weekend after weekend, month after month, year after year? I didn’t think so. They didn’t pay me either for the first 24 years of my career when I taught and coached like you but missed out on my life outside of the classroom, before I learned a truth about teaching languages:

If you plan, plan to fail. Planning is not conducive to what real human communication is. You don’t plan conversations. Most especially, YOU DON’T MEMORIZE CONVERSATIONS. Rather, when you plan, communication is seriously thwarted. And the Standard in our field is Communication, y’all… Someone has to say it, even if no one wants to hear it except the CI Renaissance podcast guys in Chicago…

Read the article below (in italics) - reprinted from last week - and reflect on your teaching. Or you could just kiss off right now the hundreds of hours you will spend this year thinning out your salary essentially to slave wages, leaving your house dirty, not keeping up properly with your own loved ones (especially your own children if you have them), sleeping poorly while hoping you won’t have too many bouts with your trench mouth nemesis this year - it’s your choice.

Here’s the article I want you to STUDY:

There is a French term, “L’Art de la Conversation” – leave it to the French to label conversation as an art form. But isn’t it true? Shouldn’t we be trying to converse with our students in our classrooms artistically instead of teaching them about how the language is structured?

The following two passages (my translation) are taken from https://bit.ly/3Ppcy0U:

1. “Conversation differs from other forms of interaction (interview, debate, symposium, negotiation, consultation) by its familiar, improvised and free nature: nothing that make it up is decided in advance and it has no other permanence than its own practice, it is divorced from any planned outcome. Its principle motivating force is pleasure.”

2. “Conversation is made up of a linguistic tissue thanks to which the members of a community not only communicate on a daily basis, but also guarantee their membership in the group.

Through conversation, the individual constructs her social place in the group.”

The passages say that conversation:

1. has a familiar nature (i.e., people who converse are familiar with one another; they want to be together)

2. is improvised (i.e., not forced – it is made up as it goes along)

3. is free (i.e., is not limited in scope to any predetermined idea or scripted text) has pleasure as its goal (i.e., we enjoy the conversation first and foremost) as per this quote from Stephen Krashen: “The path of pleasure is the only path. The path of pain does not work for language acquisition.”

5. is made up of linguistic tissue (i.e., the target language) guarantees a person’s membership in the group (i.e., building a classroom community is key to what we do and we need to do it consciously.)

The passage reveals things that we would do well to think about while trying to put CI into our classrooms:

1. We shouldn’t try to force our students into conversations.

2. Our communication in class with our students should feel as if it has a familiar nature.

3. Our communication in class with our students should feel improvised.

4. Our communication in class with our students should feel free.

5. Our communication in class with our students should feel pleasurable.

6. Our communication in class with our students should feel that it is made up of an unpolluted linguistic tissue – the language we are teaching them – and not some random daily mix of English and the target language.

7. Our communication with our students in class should guarantee their place in a community.

We would do well to ask ourselves:

Have we ever actually been in a conversation with our students, however simple, in the ways described above? Has that ever even been one of our goals – to communicate in meaningful ways with our students that guarantee their membership in the group? Do we even speak in those ways with other adults? Is just enjoying conversing with our students enough or do we also have to worry about the test? Do our conversations guarantee our own membership in the group? Do our conversations bring us the happiness of meaningful communication with others?

Personally, my goal as a language teacher has always been to be able to just relax and communicate with my students by using interesting and meaningful, relaxed, agenda-less language.

A lot of us have probably had that goal. We’re tired of trying to force kids to learn our language. It never worked.

Can you see yourself teaching in a natural and lighthearted way where the conversation uplifts everyone in the room, even visitors? Can you see yourself standing in front of your students interacting with them in a back and forth, reciprocal, participatory sharing of meaning that reflects the ground-breaking research of Lev Vygotsky over 100 years ago?

That’s the end of the article. Wake up. Smell the coffee. Give your kids something to get excited about this year. Or just go ahead and do what you did last year and suck at teaching your language like I did for a quarter of a century in South Carolina. It’s your choice.

Read some of the testimonials below. These teachers support the point I made in this article:

https://www.benslavic.com/testimonials/