Teaching a language without talking about life feels... empty
Reading, Meaning, and the Work of Language — Part 4
In the last post I wrote about patience: the time meaning sometimes needs in order to form.
That reflection led me to something I noticed often in my classrooms: even when I'd slow down interaction and allow interpretation to develop, conversations could still feel strangely flat. Students would participate, ideas would be exchanged, language would be correct… and nothing quite stayed with anyone afterwards.
It is not a problem of fluency, and not necessarily a problem of topic difficulty. Maybe it is a problem of distance? Many classroom discussions remain at a safe descriptive level where language circulates without attaching itself to experience. Students describe opinions they do not quite hold, defend positions they do not care about, and respond to questions designed mainly to generate speech. The result is participation without investment.
(In ELT classrooms, this is already something most of us already take into account when planning a lesson. But what about the other classrooms?)
Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogic Imagination (1981), suggests that meaning emerges from the encounter between voices, not from isolated statements. Words carry traces of lived contexts, and they gain weight when speakers recognise themselves in what is being said. When language is detached from experience, it becomes technically accurate but communicatively light.
In language teaching, this separation often happens unintentionally. Materials are selected for level appropriacy, lexical range, or exam relevance, and discussions are organised to ensure everyone speaks. These are reasonable priorities. But when communication is organised only around linguistic coverage, students quickly learn that classroom speech does not need to connect to their actual thinking. They produce language competently while remaining personally absent from it.
In Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks argues that learning deepens when participants are allowed to bring their presence into the room. She adds one more layer to it: she usually shares first, both to model and to create the notion of a safe space. We build meaning together.
In language classrooms this becomes visible when a conversation shifts from answering questions to negotiating meaning. Students begin to listen to each other instead of waiting for their turn, and disagreement can become a way of understanding rather than a problem to manage.
Fiction often enables this shift because it provides a shared reference point without demanding personal revelation. A character’s decision, a silence in dialogue, or an unresolved ending allows readers to approach complex themes indirectly. In a classroom, the discussion remains about the text, yet it also becomes about experience. Language carries life without requiring anyone to narrate their own.
Next week I want to close this series by looking at what actually makes a conversation interesting — not the number of questions we ask, but the kind of thinking a text invites.
If this kind of attention interests you, Rafael Ottati and I have been exploring it with a small group of teachers in In Short. We meet bi-weekly around a short story and use it as a shared space for conversation where language connects naturally to interpretation and experience.
Two groups are currently open:
Thursdays — 7:00–8:45 pm
Fridays — 4:15–6:00 pm
Course fee: R$1120 (installments available)
Recordings remain available for 30 days.
You can find all the details and register here:
https://www.gabrielafroes.com/courses/other-courses/in-short-a-guided-reading-course