Learning a Foreign Language: Common Misconceptions

No, they are NOT. Think about it, they spend up to 2 years immersed in a language 24 hours a day before they can even make a sentence. How long would it take an adult before he could say " give me a cookie" ? Two weeks? A month? Adults have developed learning strategies that kids do not have, and they can learn a lot better (but not pronounce better). When people say that kids learn better than adults, they usually refer to bilingual children whose parents are talking to in a second language half the time. If you spent 4-5 hours a day every day hearing a Foreign Language in a meaningful context, you probably would learn the language too.
Context is important to learning a Foreign Language. This is the reason that learning in an immersion environment works better than class learning. People are a lot more likely to remember something they can relate to an actual experience (i.e. reading a menu in a French restaurant and ordering food, then eating it) , as opposed to a textbook lesson (i.e.: learning vocabulary about food, reading an example of a menu and pretending to order from it, while not actually getting to eat the food...). But kids who are taught one hour of Foreign Language once a week usually only know the names of colors, a couple of songs and how to count up to 10 after a year of learning. It makes parents feel good, but it's pretty inefficient.
So it is never too late to start learning a Foreign Language.

Students sometimes complain that pair work with other students is not helpful, because they are not sure that what they and how they say it is right.  It is true that in an ideal situation I would pair up every student with a native speaker for 30 minutes per class.  As it is not possible, the next best thing is to practice with the other students.  They know the same things you do, and chances are, if you understand what they say, and they understand what you say, then you are communicating in a foreign language.  It might not be perfect, but it conveys information, which is the main goal.  The more you practice speaking, the less inhibited you get, and the better your speaking skills will be.

This is more of a personal opinion, but actually an article I just read kind of agreed with that. However when I was training to be a teacher, one of the big criteria to successful learning was " using only the target language" (the target language is the one you're aiming to teach, or if you are the student, to learn).  One fellow student-teacher was even supposed to teach latin in... latin! (Never mind that nobody actually knows how it was pronounced for sure…) . I think it was in reaction to the times when a Foreign Language was treated as just another subject, like maths, when you talked about it, and did not use it to communicate. I do agree that you need to use the target language to communicate as much as possible in the classroom, but there is no reason to be fudamentalist about it. I use English quite regularly to explain grammar. I try to explain to my students what the equivalent grammar point is in English, or if it is different, in what ways it is different. I think that it is important to help students import concepts they already know and apply it to something they don't know yet. In the case of European languages it is very much true, because they have a lot in common. It might not be quite as useful if you are teaching Arabic, but it would still be somewhat useful. All languages have common concepts.
However you should probably teach in the target language at least 70-80% of the time, and increase that time to 100% for more advanced students. But I don't always have the motivation to spend 10 minutes explaining what a word mean in French, or playing pictionnary with my students, when a single word in English would clear up the sky. They might remember it better, but they will be exposed to a lot less new vocabulary (1 word every 10 minutes! That's 5 words per class...). Like for everything, you need to find the right balance, and it is going to change depending on your students.

Unfortunately it is the truth.  I don't know where it comes from, better hearing, better knowledge of your own grammar and language, but time and time again I have students who succeed very well without putting a lot of efforts in, and others who just do not get it, however hard they work (and who are very good in other subjects). Part of it is how they learn, but it's not just that. It seems to be the way your brain is wired, some people are just better at languages.
However, I don't think it matters. You do not need to speak perfectly to be able to communicate in a Foreign Language. You can get huge gratification from speaking really poorly in a language, as long as you can get your meaning across, and interact with people.
Foreign Language students tend to come in 2 types: the perfectionist and the talkative. Perfectionists are going to want every sentence to be perfect, and therefore progress not as fast, because they don't take as many chances. Talkative types do not care about how they say something, as long as they can be understood. They usually make lots of mistakes, but they communicate. The perfect student is somewhere in the middle. He/she is willing to take chances because he/she mostly wants to communicate, but he/she is also going to try and correct his/her mistakes.

Knowing how to speak a language does not necessarily make you a better teacher. You still need to understand the language, in order to be able to explain it. A lot of native speakers have no clue why they say things the way they say them, and therefore cannot explain it very well. I often tell my students " I have to get back to you on that, I'm not sure" . I just know if a word is masculine or feminine, but for a foreign learner, it is not an helpful explanation. There are some (not many!) rules to deduce the gender of a noun in French, and non-native teachers are a lot more likely to know them than a native teacher.
On the other hand, I think that native speakers are better at teaching the culture of their language, but this is not so important when you are just starting to learn a language.  And nothing beats visiting a country to absorb its culture.

Accents do not come from your teacher but from your culture (your phonologic system is the sounds you are used to pronouncing, and they come from your native language. Kids are better at PRONOUNCING (pronouncing only) languages, because their phonologic system is not quite so set in its ways) . You can learn how to say "u" or "r" like the French do, but you will not learn it from your teacher. He/she can explain how to put your tongue in your mouth or how to put your lips together, but you will still need to do the grunt work and repeat it a hundred times... That's what language lab are for. Unfortunately, nobody these days spends enough time in the language lab. 

This is not about teaching languages specifically. When I started teaching, I was scared to death that my students would get bored. I had been so bored as a student, I wanted to be a fun teacher. I was taught fun ways to teach, and thought it was great. I made students move around the classroom, talk to each other, play games (pictionary!). It was really good. Later I have been trying to tell myself that in some cases, it is necessary to be boring. They need to learn grammar. They need to practice the mechanics of the language. It is not necessarily fun, but it is useful to learn the language. Besides, your idea of fun can be different from your students’. At some point I explained some rules on how to pronounce words according to their spelling. I thought that was really boring, and I apologized for that. A few students thought it was fascinating. They had never realized that there were rules to that madness. Suddenly they could apply a few rules and not be scared to sound like fools. They thought that it was a great thing to learn.
It made me realize that sometimes, what is fun is just to learn something new, and not how you learn it. Sure, some people will think I'm very old-fashioned. I think I'm just ahead of the next educational trend...