Dear learners of English
They say that even before the birth, a baby hears when their parents talk to her.
Then when the baby appears into the world she spends a year or more to turn her listening skills into the first shy efforts to produce sounds and short phrases.
Later, as a child grows her skills of listening and speaking grow with her.
This philosophy very often brings a lot of educators to a false, in my opinion, concept of learning English as a second or a foreign language in the way children do.
This approach finds a lot of resistance among adult students, first of all.
Why?
Adults do not desire to play kids’ games and repeat childish sentences with which children start speaking. I tried this ‘modern’ method a few times and always failed because my university graduates with serious positions in their companies refused to learn English of ‘cats and dogs’ and always tried to say something more sophisticated, normally related to their business duties.
Now, a lot of speculations go around the best way of listening in order to boost speaking.
I believe that listening develops first of all listening.
Here what a lot of educators say: “Listen as much as you can!”
Great. What if I listen to Chinese 5 hours a day without knowing a word of the language?
Will it help me to start speaking Chinese?
In fact, after a week I will possibly be able to repeat most common words of the languages without knowing what they mean in the language I know from the moment I spoke to my parents.
That is why I stand on the position that if you want to improve your English, listening must be a very active process with a strict plan of exercises and desirably under control of an educator.
Here’s the program of listening with the description of exercises and drills that will ultimately guide both a student and an instructor to a desirable result of speaking better English.(Taken from my report: How to improve your English. Fast and easy methods.)
Listening.
A student listens to the whole text and tries to understand it without looking into the text.
In case she understands the text completely, she has to go to the element of the training on this stage.
If the student doesn’t understand the recording, she can read the text and find out the meaning of the unknown words and then to listen to the text again.
The main task of this element is to hear and understand all the words in the text.
I believe is important to hear all the words in the text, not only to catch the idea of the recording and answer true-false questions.
Why is it necessary to understand every word said?
The way native speakers in various countries pronounce the words in the same sentence may sound differently from the way our instructors pronounce them or we do.
That’s the reason we don’t understand native speakers of English when we hear how they speak. With movies it is even worse.
Yet, when we read the text of the conversation we have just heard, we understand everything.
That’s why we need to compare the written text to what speakers ‘make out’ of it when they speak, especially when we have no chances to ask a speaker to articulate, repeat the phrase or say the same phrase slowly.
I believe listening itself serves us less effectively than when we listen and repeat and check whether we understand correctly what has been said.
How to do so.
• Listen to the passage and try to understand what is said.
• Listen again, this time sentence by sentence.
• Repeat what the speaker says and try to understand the phrase completely.
• Check your understanding with the written text.
If you understand the phrases of the text in the way they are written and pronounced, well done!
If not, try again until you reach the point of complete understanding.
I know it seems like a lot of work and, not too creative and much fun…
But if you want to be a champion, that’s one of the ways to the top!
As for the textbook and recordings, feel free to choose the one on your level of the language expertise.
Try to avoid too much of a challenge, as instead of even slow progress, you may get the feeling that you don’t go forward at all.
At this moment I would like to warn you of asking a language expert for help.
You may find the one who doesn’t accept my method and will try to offer her methods of teaching. In short, do it yourself, follow your intuition.
And remember. I do not promise ‘a rose garden’ to my followers as the most of teachers of English, especially native speakers of English do.
The way how they learned to speak English does not suit us, for whom English is a second language.
Native speakers of English can educate only children who will learn the language in a similar way as they learned their mother tongue.
For adults these methods may work only when they are in a community where only English is spoken, which is a rare case. At least for my adult students who always learn English thru their native language and always compare an English sentence to the same sentence in their language.
Only non-native speakers, teachers of English know how to teach English, especially the ones who have not lived for years in English speaking countries.
Why?
Because the teacher usually says, that it is impossible to speak English without living abroad.(a very popular myth these days)
So, try to do all on your own. Following my instructions you will easily find what and how works for you better and you will start speaking good English even without living abroad.
Another thing that may also happen as soon as you share your plan of studying with other teachers, they may accept your idea painfully: every teacher is fond of her ways of teaching.
Let me repeat that: I have met a good number of serious educators in various countries and of many nationalities.Most of them had their individual concepts of teaching their students.
But, it’s not about how intelligent the teacher is, it is about how well you are able to speak after being taught by your teacher, right?
My mentor Brian Tracy often says:
“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”
In other words it is not enough to know the subject you teach, it is necessary to lead your student to the results she wants”
That’s the essence of the studying process as I understand it.
George
