Language teaching is all about relationships. As Earl Stevick famously put it, success in learning a language “depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom” (1980 p. 4). For the teacher, getting students engaged in learning activities, and involved in developing communicative competence, requires interpersonal skills. It requires the ability to create connections. In a systematic overview of the motivational dimension of language teaching, Lamb (2017) argues that it is “responsiveness”, a capacity founded on empathy and developed over years of practice, that “defines the successful motivator” (p. 312). Increasingly, researchers are coming to realize that language teaching may be best be understood as a relational practice, and that students’ motivation is shaped not just by the things teachers do in the classroom, but also how they are as people (Mercer, 2016).