- Here's a question that I get on a fairly regular basis
in one shape or another.
Can you just listen your way to fluency?
(swooshing)
Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com.
Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls,
it's an interesting question, isn't it?
And quite an appealing idea, too.
Can we just listen, listen, listen our way
to English mastery?
Yeah.
No, not really, is the simple answer to the question.
It doesn't really work like that
despite what many educational government agencies
and marketers will say quoting research
that is yeah, pretty out of date.
A while a go I went to see a lecture
by guy called Roy Lyster.
Roy Lyster is one of the leading names
in emergent education.
Emergent being the idea of learning a second language
not by studying it as such, but by studying another subject
at school and then getting the second language.
It's a kind of freebee alongside that.
So say that you study history in, I don't know, English.
You learn history but then you also somehow get English
as something that comes along with that as a bonus.
And yes, it is a pretty appealing idea
and I do not want to in any way diminish the accomplishments
of emergent schools and emergent education,
because they do what they set out to do
even if that is often not understood by many people
who expect it to be more than what is realistic.
But basically the ideas have been popular for a long time
originating from ideas that were first conceived
in the 60s and in the 70s and 80s.
Again, about learning a language in what was thought
of as a natural approach.
Learning automatically just by exposing yourself to it.
One of the most popular ideas that came with this
was Stephen Krashen's idea of I plus one,
inputs plus a little bit.
The idea being that if you listened to a lot of English
that was just a little bit over your proficiency level
that would somehow magically build up
and you would become fluent as a result.
Mm, yeah.
The problem however was was that it was
only ever a theoretical idea
and it never really stood the test of empirical research.
Again I wouldn't want to diminish the accomplishments
of emergent schools, emergent education or ideas per se,
but as Peter Skehan very, very rightly points out
in his book, A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning,
kids in emergent schools get goods at what they practice.
And that is passively receiving information,
but speaking skills and productive ability
in the language tends to lag behind in the extremes
so that they become what we call passive bilinguals.
They're able to understand no problem whatsoever,
but when it comes to actually speaking themselves,
yeah, they never really get that good.
This does not bode well for you if you are hoping
that you can just listen to a shitload of English
and suddenly get fluent in the language.
The brain, she don't work like that.
Now this is a complex process so my explanation here
is somewhat simplistic but part of the problem
is that the brain is very, very good
at filling in information that you actually don't notice,
don't get and then not really aware of.
When you're listening to someone in conversation,
they will say a lot of things that you simply don't catch,
but your brain just fills in the holes
using extra information, visual information,
context, body language, facial expression
and a whole host of other things.
This is fantastic for actually comprehending
what people say because well, it means you don't actually
have to understand and catch everything
to be able to do it.
But it's pretty useless when it comes to acquiring language
and moving it from passive to active
so that you can actually use it.
One of the other big problems
is that often we understand the surface level meaning.
But don't really notice
or get the underlying deeper meanings
and intentions behind what people say.
So although we believe to have comprehended
and understood what is being said to us,
actually we haven't quite got it on the level
or depth that we thought we had.
And all this simply means that
well you actually aren't learning
like you think you are learning.
In order to improve in a language two things
have got to happen repetitively.
Input, output.
That is a learning stage.
The learning of the language that you need to use
in conversation and not just surface level learning,
not just learning the words, and the rules,
and a few phrases and expressions,
and kind of understanding what they mean.
Perhaps if a translation in your native language,
but a deeper level of learning,
actually understanding what people say,
what it means and why they say it in the way that they do.
That is the underlying deeper intentions behind the phrases
and expressions that we use in conversation.
Then the second step, output, is simply practicing that.
Taking what you have learned
and consciously practicing it to fluency.
Both of these steps have to happen
and they have to happen repetitively
in order for improvement to happen.
And so straight away you can see
that the idea of just listening, listening, listening
where the reality is, is you're actually missing 99%
of what's coming your way and not consciously understanding,
processing and then actually implementing that
isn't gonna get you fluent particularly quickly.
Now, this video is starting to run long,
but there's a word I've mentioned a couple of times today.
Intention.
This is a very, very important word to understand
when it comes to understanding
the language learning process.
I'm not going to talk about it today,
but in tomorrow's video what I'm gonna do
is I'm going to take a concrete example
from next week's extraordinary English speakers lesson.
Members if you haven't done this week's yet,
well you've got, by my reckoning, one day to get it done.
Link in the description.
Go get her done, but I'm gonna take a concrete example
from next week's extraordinary English speaker's lesson
and I'm gonna use that to demonstrate the idea
of intention and that's coming in tomorrow's video.
I look forward to it.
Again, extraordinary English speaker's members
make sure you get this week's lesson done
before you move on to next week's
which is gonna be published tomorrow.
If you are struggling to improve your English conversation,
you are going to want
to check out my English learning group,
Extraordinary English Speakers although it's only open
to people who have already read my book,
Master English Fast!
Which you can find at masterenglishfast.com.
Alright, that's it from me today.
If you found this video extraordinarily helpful,
give it a nice big old thumbs up.
If you hated it, give it a thumbs up anyway.
And regardless, I'll see you my friend
in tomorrow's video where we are going to talk about,
like I said, intention.
Buh-bye.
(upbeat music)
Look at that bastard there.
Crikey.
Spots at my age.
What am I, a fucking teenager?
(upbeat music)