- Today, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna talk a little bit
about what my own research tells us
about good English learning materials.
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Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com,
here today to talk to you once again
a little bit about good English learning materials.
There's this idea,
kind of a silly one, really, when you think about it,
but a pervasive one,
this idea that you learnt English at school.
Therefore, all you've got to do now is activate it
by practise, practise, practising .
Yeah, it makes sense, kind of.
And it is true
that you do have to use your English,
whether practising or just doing it in the real world
to activate it and make it into a habit,
that is, an automated skill that just happens
without you having to think about it.
Yes, this is correct.
And yes, it is correct that first,
you have to learn the English
that you are going to automate
via this doing of the English.
That much is correct.
Where you go wrong, however,
is in thinking that you learned English at school.
Newsflash, you almost definitely didn't.
These things change,
differ from country to country to country.
My own research, my own experience,
is mostly with the Asian countries,
so I am really talking
from that perspective here in this video.
However, I would imagine the same is true
for pretty much everywhere.
The English you learned at school wasn't really English.
It was supposed to be.
It was supposed to be something representative
of day-to-day, basic, general English,
but it almost definitely wasn't.
It was actually something else,
an approximation of English,
something that uses English words and English grammar,
but was actually something fundamentally different.
One of my own research projects published in a top journal,
I will add reference and link in the description,
found that Japanese secondary school English textbooks
used completely different phrases and expressions
and chunks of English in their,
quote, unquote, conversational dialogues to real English,
to the extent where the only conclusion
that we could come to
was that the textbooks were representative
not of general English conversation,
but of nothing other than themselves.
Or to put it more simply,
the expressions, phrases, and dialogues
contained in the textbooks were all but useless
in the real world.
This is a problem.
I did a second research project
that I will add is now published
in the number one journal in my field,
also referenced and linked in the description.
In this study, I measured Japanese secondary school
student's fluency using a special kind
of psychometric testing
to measure how they process the chunks of language
taken from the textbooks that they used.
I found that they were highly fluent in this language,
which would have been a really, really good thing
if the language tested
was in any way useful in the real world,
which my original study had already shown was not the case.
So, as you can see,
the idea that you learned English in school
and all you've got to do is activate it via practise
actually doesn't really make much sense
because the students that I studied,
they were already pretty damn good
at the English they had learned.
They just didn't realise it
because it was not the English they needed, the real world.
So, just practising , practising , practising
would do nothing for them because the stuff that they need,
not in here.
The materials that you use and study matter a lot.
They are, after all, the samples of English
that you put into your head.
And just like building a house
with poor quality building materials
will only result in a shitty house,
learning from poor quality English learning materials
will only result in shitty English
being spoken by you.
Now, if you're not too sure
what the best kind of English learning materials are
or simply want me to cut away the hassle
and give you everything that you need,
you're going to wanna consider joining
my prestigious English Mastery group,
the Extraordinary English Speakers.
Among other benefits, each and every week,
you are going to get a brand new lesson from me to study
that's gonna give you samples of English to use
in any situation you want,
whether you'll use English in business context,
in social situations,
or you live in an English-speaking country,
we've got you covered with everything that you need
to get out there and speak English,
confident that you are sounding natural
and fluent when you do it.
Of course, the design
of the Extraordinary English Speakers lessons
is based on my own research,
years of testing and tweaking have gone
into the design and writing of the lessons,
to, again, ensure that you can get out there
and just get on with speaking the English language
with less hassle, less stress, and fewer headaches.
The place to go is DoingEnglish.com/EES,
link in the description.
And because it is just so much easier
to demonstrate how the lessons work
than it is to explain it,
what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you
the very first lesson for free, lesson zero,
which talks about the method that we use
alongside actually doing one of the lessons.
So, just head over to DoingEnglish.com/EES
and grab your free lesson.
Now, I will see you on the other side.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
this is me Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another video.
Thanks for watching.
If you found this useful, give it a nice, big old thumbs-up.
If you hated it, give it a thumbs-up anyway.
And I'll see you, my friend, in the next one.
Goodbye.
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