What is the role of speaking?
How important is speaking?
How can we improve our ability to speak?
And the reason I'm talking about it is that, you know, wherever I go, if I
speak to people about language learning, whether it was, uh, the group that
I met up with in Poland, one of the participants was a teacher who said
that her students are afraid to speak.
Uh, I met, uh, a few people in the, in the lounge in Toronto Airport,
'cause our flight was delayed, and this lady was saying that she had
French in school and she understands, but she's so afraid to speak.
It just doesn't come out.
Whenever she tries to speak, she fails.
Uh, and I get these comments all the time, people saying that,
you know, I understand, I can read and, but I just can't speak.
So kind of think about this and I, you know, The first thing is obviously to
speak well, you have to speak a lot.
So if people are intimidated and reluctant to speak, they will never
improve their ability to speak.
So the first thing is you have to get over that hurdle, uh, that reluctance
to speak, because ultimately, as I say, you have to speak a lot.
So the next question is, why is it that people are afraid to speak
but they're not afraid to listen?
They're not afraid to read.
Maybe I don't like to write 'cause I'm lazy.
But it's, it's not a fear unless you're writing a business letter
and you're afraid to make mistakes.
But by and large, the thing that seems to, you know, generate this fear in
people is, is the, is is speaking.
So I think there are a number of issues there.
Number one, uh, we need to be prepared to speak and as you know, if you follow
me here, that means getting a lot of the language in you listening, reading,
even using our mini stories, which is, you know, these are stories with
a lot of repetition of high frequency verbs, common structures in the
language, common words in the language.
You wash these over yourself so that you are familiar with them.
You at least potentially have words that you can use because
if you don't have the vocabulary, you're, you've got nowhere to go.
There...
you've got no weapons, nothing that you can find to actually
maintain a conversation.
And if you haven't invested a lot of time in a lot of listening,
even more so than reading.
Reading, as I've said before, helps you acquire vocabulary, but
listening is developing your ability to understand what people say.
If you can't understand what people say, you're gonna have
an awful time in a conversation.
So the first thing in order not to feel afraid in a conversation is to
be prepared and when I, when people say that they can read, but they can't
speak, but they only ever read short newspaper articles, that's not the same.
I read, for example, even with my limited exposure to, uh, Polish, I read this whole
book without the benefit of LingQ without being able to look up any words because I
have acquired so many words through LingQ that there's only a small percentage,
relatively small percentage of words in here that I don't know, so this is
developing my confidence in the language.
So obviously if you're gonna speak comfortably, you have to be confident that
you can understand what people are saying.
You have to have words that you can slowly try to activate.
If you do those things, you should be less afraid.
I also don't think there's any particular need to start speaking
any earlier than you need to.
Any activity that has you involved with the language listening and
reading or writing is all helping you.
There should be no sort of pressure to speak, in my opinion, and there
is far too much pressure on people to speak and to speak correctly.
When I was in Poland recently, I was speaking, I was making
all kinds of mistakes.
It doesn't bother me.
Another reason it doesn't bother me is because to me, when I'm speaking
with someone in a language that I don't speak at all well, like Polish.
My purpose is to try to somehow communicate, to try to understand
what the other person is saying, and also to trigger meaningful input.
Because if I'm in a conversation, I want to know what that person is saying.
If I'm listening to something, I can fade and not listen or not focus.
But if you're in a conversation with someone, you're very much focused
on what that person is saying.
You're trying very hard to understand what they're saying.
You're focused, there's a certain white heat there of
attention paid to the language.
And so the speaking opportunity for me is on the one hand, a chance to
practice my speaking, a chance to become aware of where my gaps are,
where my faults are, but also I'm generating very meaningful content.
So as long as I'm achieving those goals, I'm trying to speak, I'm becoming aware
of my shortcomings and my problems.
I'm generating meaningful content.
I'm communicating.
I'm doing all of those things.
Then I'm satisfied.
It doesn't matter to me if I don't do as well as I would like to do, because
I know that if I continue doing this and if I continue my input activities,
I will only improve and I will improve as quickly as I can improve.
I can't force myself to improve.
I can only commit to continuing the process of listening and
reading, but also the process of speaking without being afraid of it.
Without assuming that someone is judging me and, and even if they have trouble
understanding me at first, or if my pronunciation isn't very good, I have
to assume that if I keep doing it and if I keep mixing it with listening and
reading, I will gradually improve, and therefore, as long as I com I'm committed
to the long-term process, how I do at a particular point in the process like
today versus three months from now versus six months from now, how I do right now.
It doesn't matter to me.
And I, I'm wondering if people who are afraid of speaking either lack patience
or lack humility and maybe with a stronger dose of patience, recognizing
that the pr the brain learns, but it learns slowly and that no one says that
you have to be an all-star performer.
That's...
you are not promised that you're gonna be an all-star performer.
Uh, you are learning for your own reasons.
If you are enjoying learning, then you should also enjoy the process of
speaking, albeit with mistakes with less than optimal, uh, pronunciation.
See it as an opportunity to keep improving, you know, a further step
in the journey towards where you eventually wanna get to, which is a
comfortable level in the language.
So, speaking is one of the sort of four major skills in language learning.
It's a major activity.
It's not one we should be afraid of.
It's one that we should do when we want to do it.
We shouldn't, in a way, jump in there too quickly if we're not comfortable.
On the other hand, we shouldn't use the fear of making a mistake as a reason
for not speaking so make sure you wanna speak when you wanna speak, start
speaking and don't second guess yourself.
There you have it, the sort of role of speaking in language acquisition
as seen from my perspective.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.