Language is CAKE

“Language is cake”. Interesting? This is a

metaphor used among language
instructors.

A good cake is surely delicious, but in

order to have a perfect cake, you need to
leave it in the oven for some time. You
cannot expect a cake to be done in one
minute, can you? On the other hand, if
you leave the cake to be baked for too long, it will certainly get burned.
In both cases, the cake will not be edible, right? The same thing goes
with languages.
The student should not expect to grasp everything about a
language in a semester or two. Some students get too confident about
how good their English is, which leads them to make more mistakes
than the regular students are making in average.
In another situation, if the cake is looking great but the first bite
proves that the taste is not good, you will be reluctant to have a second
bite even if you are so hungry. The presence of both content and
technique is essential in the educational process just as the presence of
both taste and presentation is essential to make you eat a full slice of
cake or even a whole cake. Hence, teachers need to ensure that they
maintain a good balance between technique and content.
In a study conducted in 1993 by Harvard researchers Dr. Nalini
Ambady and Dr. Robert Rosenthal, students were able to accurately
predict the teachers who were really good and those who were really bad
by observing them for 6 seconds only!