language meditation

 It's not so easy to practice meditation in classrooms, but as I am reflecting on the course I have just taken, there is something so rich and meaningful when one's meditations are centered around learning a new language. "Language Meditation": now how about that? I am thinking about the idea of getting students to practice mindfulness of characters; similarities between characters in a first language and second language; associations they make between one language and another, etc. The whole point of it is to say that when I can truly slow down and appreciate the layers that go with learning a language, I might find myself more engaged and willing to explore learning new words.
  If language learning is only about trying to match a sentence to a normative template of what a "grammatical" sentence looks like, I then overlook the importance of the way that meaning is often spontaneously and unpredictably established between words and sentences. In other words, I overlook the miraculous way in which no two people see the sentence the same way, even though they may technically operate from the very same grammars.
   This way of looking at language takes it out of the traditional correspondence theory of language, wherein one word signifies only one distinct meaning. Instead, it suggests that there are no limits to how words can be linked to other words or beheld in a novel freshness with every sentence that we make. Is it possible to teach language through poetry, even if the poetry doesn't "make sense" in the traditional discourse of making sense? Zen poetry comes to mind here, wherein the meaning is communicated somewhat indirectly, through spurts of imagination and inspiration.