Interaction between instructor and student, particularly at the junior high school and high school levels, is usually limited to group repetition or response. Such performances are restricted to written tests, the results of which are usually kept confidential. Those that excel are clearly evident and open to being ghammered down h by their peers. Superior students may deliberately do poorly to avoid standing out, and extremely sensitive students may even drop out of a class, or school, to avoid being singled out. Some instructors evaluate their students outside of the classroom, one on one, or observe their interaction with other students during pair practice or small-group exercises.
Old habits are hard to break.
There is increased use of tape recorders and computers to give students access to native-speaker pronunciation and usage, but not much spontaneous glive h interaction. No matter how good the software, a tape recorder or computer cannot duplicate the unpredictability of live discourse between humans. Accordingly, students are not adequately prepared for that unpredictability. This would not be an insurmountable problem if such instructors were willing to confront their limitations and join together with their students to find solutions to problems that arise during instruction. The Language Teacher, other trade journals, and even in Japan s English-language newspapers, so I will not discuss it further here.