By Robby
If you are new here please read this first.
😛 Happy Christmas to all foreign English speakers around the world! 😛
I’ve done some research on the Internet about the latest English learning and improving methods, and it appears that all my work on this blog is good for nothing! 🙁 In order to improve your English, apparently you don’t have to do anything else but listen and my focus on the spoken aspect of English is just a waste of your time!
Forget about plenty of speaking practice, my friends foreign English speakers! Just go online, get one of those revolutionary pieces of English learning audio CDs, sit back, listen to those stories and let the English language seep into your mind automatically! And you know why it works?
Results of countless researches have confirmed that children learn their native language by first listening for a good few months and then they start speaking it! So, quite a few English teaching professionals claim that you should take advantage of this fact and start harnessing the power of listening. Basically, you should adopt a position of a child and let the others fuss around you. You don’t have to take any action, and you’ll be able to start speaking fluent English when you’re ready and when all that audio content has settled into your mind.
I know, I know my friends, you hate being treated like a child and I also know that deep down inside you are suspecting that such English learning and improving methods don’t work ❗
If you’re anything like me, the first question you’d ask to those who came up with this passive immersion listening method would be – “Hold on, could it be that babies only listen during the first year because they’re simply unable to speak?”
It’s exactly the same question I would ask, and I think it’s completely obvious to anyone who delves on this matter for a short while that there’s a difference between the first language acquisition in your early childhood and learning and improving English when you’re an adult :!!
You – and me – and any other adult foreign English speaker is well capable of speaking unlike the baby who spends his first twelve months only listening because he needs to build his comprehension skills; his brain is simply unable to process information like the adult brain.
By saying that you should focus on listening stories or dialogues in English is equivalent to saying your brain and mouth aren’t capable of working together and that you need to wire your brain like a baby when he’s preparing to start speaking!
Actually our brain has already been wired to process abstract concepts and do logical reasoning – then why treat it like that of a baby? Of course, listening plays a huge role in a second language acquisition process, but the point I’m trying to make here is that you have to be constantly engaged in a speech practicing if you want to experience any gains in your fluency and ability to communicate.
So, have you started seeing the truth now? And how about another piece of inconvenient truth so that you can tell everyone to stop treating you like a child and stop providing English language teaching and improving material in form of a Lego set?
For some reason many linguists are finding the early human development years as a starting point for second and subsequent language acquisition, and so they also assume that once a child starts speaking by saying single words and then sticks them together in two and three word sentences, it has to be the most natural way to acquire a language.
What they fail to see is that the little kid simply can’t handle more information which is not the case with you, you, you, and any adult foreigner, and I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t learn and improve the English language by learning phrases instead. Yes, phrases, collocations, and idiomatic expressions are the basic language building blocks – not separate words!
Thanks for reading this blog post and allow me to wish you a very, very Happy and Harmonious Holiday Season!
I hope you’ll receive plenty of really useful gifts and who knows – maybe for some of you Santa Claus is wrapping up a set of English Harmony DVDs even as we speak! 😉
Robby
P.S. Would you like to find out why I’m highlighting some of the text in red? Read this article and you’ll learn why it’s so important to learn idiomatic expressions and how it will help you to improve your spoken English!
P.S.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!
P.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out the English Harmony System HERE!