Small steps

A couple of months ago, Eduardo, one of my elementary students, went to Finland on business for a week. I was really excited for him, for as his English teacher, I saw this as a big step in his English learning. What better way to open up new possibilities for your English, I thought.
As his English teacher, I now realise, I should have been nervous, not excited. What actually happened was that Edu experienced an accute attack of language shock. Unable to communicate well with all these fluent speakers from different countries, he just couldn't communicate at all. His fellow Spanish colleagues spoke for him instead. It was really demotivating for him because it was a step too far.
More recently, I decided to try out a reader with the class. Readers are simplified books, often novels or short stories, written with learners in mind and graded by level of English so that there are books even for very elementary learners. I was amazed by the students' positive reaction to it. Three of the six students read the first 2 chapters that I gave them the same week and came to class encouraged by how easy it was to read without a dictionary. They were happy to be reading for pleasure and not studying English. Most importantly, they were enjoying the story.
This reader was motivating because it didn't threaten, like a room full of English-savvy Scandinavians might to a poor elementary speaker. Going to Finland, I realised, was like trying to read War and Peace. The reader gently opened a new avenue in these learners' English exploration that perhaps they didn't know existed; now they can say: I can read English, too. It's a step in the right direction.

If you want to see some readers, check out these sites:
http://www.macmillanenglish.com/readers/studentsite/index.html
http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/general/readers/?cc=global
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/catalogue/subject/item382366/Readers/?site_locale=en_GB

Swimming

Last year my daughter Rosie learnt to swim. No, that’s wrong; she didn’t learn, she decided to swim. It was weird, the process took no more than a moment. What happened was this: she was sitting on the side of the pool with her towel wrapped around her, dripping and shivering and watching a friend, Carmen, kick her way unaided from her mum to the side of the pool. Rosie dumped her towel, pulled off her armbands and jumped in. We were given no warning. Despite a total lack of technique –she swam like a spermatozoa or a deformed tadpole- there was no doubt about it, she was swimming. Within an hour she’d demonstrated rudimentary breathing techniques, crawl, doggie paddle as well as fearless underwater skills. It was like a switch had been flicked. We were amazed.

What is the key to success in Rosie learning to swim so fast? Well, she might have watched Carmen carefully in order to know what to do, but I’m not sure that instruction or demonstration were so important. For me the keys were:

motivation – Rosie could see the advantages in being able to swim without aids such as independence, speed and especially, being a big girl.

fearlessness – Rosie wasn’t afraid of the risks involved (such as drowning!)

decisiveness – Rosie saw the process not as a long hard climb to achievement but as a decision to make: Am I going to do it or not?

Some of my students speak English like this. They don’t paddle around the shallow end with their armbands on or just dip their toes in the water, they leap into the deep end. I’m not talking about any particular level: I know some elementary students aged 8 or 9 who speak English fearlessly and I know upper intermediate adults who hardly say anything in English. The advantages the real English swimmers have are precisely those that Rosie showed that day at the pool. They are motivated by English and you can see that they enjoy getting wet; they are also unafraid of drowning and accept that learning means getting lungfulls of water from time to time.

Most important though, is that switch. They made a decision to swim unaided because they know that for some things you can only learn by doing.

An analogy about language learning

Meeting language

The first time we meet someone, we may not even talk to them. We will probably still remember their face, but that’s all we remember, just their face. In language learning, this is like seeing a word and saying, ‘I know I’ve seen that somewhere before…’ The next time we meet the person, we are told their name; unfortunately, that’s no guarantee that we’ll remember it in the future. This is like learning a word but later forgetting its meaning. It happens all the time. And this can go on several more times before we can confidently recall a word and its meaning. So it is with words and rules. We can expect to bump into new items several times before we can truthfully claim to know it well.

Visiting language

The good news is that there are many ways of accelerating this process of 'becoming friends' with new language, all of which could be described as 'visiting'. Instead of waiting to accidently bump into a word, you can deliberately visit them again and again. There are many techniques for meeting, visiting and revisiting language, and you might like to reflect now on which of them are your preferred techniques. To give you an idea, they include such methods as:

• listening to and reading things you’ve already studied
• revising and taking part in tests and exams
• testing yourself
• going over your notes
• using word cards or flashcards
• listening to and singing your favourite songs
• reading things you enjoy in English
• repeating phrases in your mind and out loud


Review
Consider the following related words:

review revision revisiting recycling

They are all valuable ways of thinking about learning English:
review = looking at language again, or noticing
revision = studying what you think you know, or working
revisiting = meeting again, or familiarising
recycling = using again, or putting it to good use

That last one, recycling, is a particularly important idea in learning English because it implies that if you don’t put what you learn into practice, you’re throwing it away. A crucial element in learning English is trying it out, experimenting, perhaps getting it a bit wrong at the start, but using it even so. Here’s a famous English cliché:

“Use it or lose it”*

Learning English is not simply about memorising lots of words or rules but about making them work for you. This means you'll learn faster if you practise English. Here are a few ways to do this:

• in a classroom, with your teacher and fellow students
• in a language exchange, or intercambio
• online, via one of the sites that get you in touch with teachers, such as myngle.com, or with other learners, such as italki.com
• online, in a virtual world like Second Life
• on holiday in an English-speaking country

While some of these take a lot of time and money, many learners find themselves talking English with someone who is always around… them! For example, I practised my Spanish numbers and letters by reading the number plates of passing cars out loud as I walked to work every day. I got a few strange looks, but it was worth it. Others have silly dialogues with imaginary people while cooking or taking a shower.

So learning a language can be seen as a series of many meetings with words, structures and sounds. Some learners may be happy to just let the language come to them, but most try to accelerate the process by actively visiting and revisiting specific language. Finally, to ensure learning, many people make sure they activate their English by using it.

*Footnote: ‘Use’ and ‘lose’ rhyme; both contain the /u:z/ sound, so it’s rhythmic and quite easy to remember.