You're welcome Fish and thanks for the new thought provoking post. Yeah, Chinese kids definitely seem to enjoy and benefit from anything that gets them out of their seats and away from the redundancy of rote learning. I had one middle school class in China of advanced students. The smallness of the class, only 25 students, and the fact that they were all so adaptable and eager to try new things, really allowed for some creativity on my part. And naturally, the more creative I got, the more creative they got. I think about 80% of the classroom work was dialogue work and role playing. I basically set the text book on the back burner and if I did use it, it was only foundational - meaning I tried to stay current with what their Chinese teacher was teaching them. The beauty of it was that I had the blessing of the principal at that school - a rarity indeed.

It didn't take long before the students themselves were creating some pretty keen dialogues and inventing some great role playing situations. They even learned that they had the liberty to change the dialogues that I wrote; as long as they didn't stray to far away from the target language or language point.

I want to stress here though that I can take very little credit for the success of that class. It was the students themselves, who, once they realized there were few boundaries, kept the ball rolling - literally and figuratively. It reminded me clearly and implicitly that the role of the teacher in the classroom should be that of facilitator and ultimately participator versus that of instructor and/or lecturer. Finding a way to tap into that storehouse of motion and emotion that Stanford speaks of may be challenging, but it is a worthy endeavor indeed.

These days I'm working in a college setting, but I still try to be mindful of the need of my students to be active rather than passive learners. Sometimes I wish I had a built in alarm system that would clang loudly when I give-in to the tendency to drone on and on. I had a great professor in an interpersonal speech communication class many years ago, who, whenever he'd find our group work or pair work to be overly pedantic, would say, "No work being done!" I think those words definitely apply to the ESL/EFL classroom where the teacher has forgotten his role as facilitator and participant.

I can glean from your post Fish that you haven't forgotten your role in the classroom and I suspect that your students feel very fortunate to have you as a teacher. Keep up the good work!