Explicit instruction does very LITTLE for language acquisition 

As a language teacher, BVP is my go to for how I should be setting myself up. I am on my third book of his. His explanations of how acquistion functions are in line with my expectations and experiences in the field. Unfortunately in a school setting teaching English in a Spanish speaking country I am 1 teacher in about 30 and I am the only teacher to question existing methodology, to bring a scientific approach to the profession and I am not understood by my bosses nor my colleagues who think grammar and the cloze and exam practice is king. I treat the job as a conversation between myself and my students giving them opportunities to meaningfully exercise the language they need to acquire based on their current competence levels.

I've been explaining that I'm much more of a facilitator for years. Who doesn't like being vindicated? I often compare the process to training for a race. Imagine you're going to swim 100M Free. Does it make sense to always train to 100M during the practice sprints? No. You need to do 150M and 200M sprints *at least* so that you can build the endurance to maintain, as much as possible, peak racing speed during that 100M. You're going to go to conferences, meet people, talk about your background, education, career, insights, opinions, etc. Well then, just talk about exactly those things! When learners get it and say something like, "Yeah, I went to this event and I felt really comfortable talking to people, I even asked questions, etc. so now I get that this practice is really helping me." I always interfect with, "What practice? You're not practicing. This is life." It's not rocket science, but it's a hard sell because the educational system has primed people differently. I act as a conduit of experience, wisdom, and ideas between relatively high-level professionals so that they're not wasting time acquiring English through something like rote memorization, but it sounds "woo-woo" or vaguely esoteric.