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crossmr

Important Aspects of Learning English

Posted 2007-10-29 14:05:04 | Comments (4)

In response to my last entry I received a couple of questions about what makes a good English speaker. I've also gotten this question from the people I teach.

What makes the best English speakers is practice. Now as to what you practice that is something entirely different. You can take a lot of different classes and learn a language in a few different ways, and the appropriateness of each method really depends on your goals.

I'm going to assume that most people who read this are interested in learning more than tourist English and hope to reach a pretty high level of fluency. With that being the case, what should you focus on? Grammar. Grammar is the foundation for it all. You can change the meaning of a sentence just by switching two words. Observe:

You are hungry. - this is a statement
Are you hungry? - this is a question

Grammar can't really be studied without vocabulary though and it is just as important in your English learning. If you're struggling for basic words and lose your dictionary, you could find yourself in a tough situation. It can also derail a conversation to be constantly looking up words in a dictionary. Vocabulary building is more than just nouns. You should build verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Understanding basic question words and their use is also important (I've created some flashcards for those) as well as proper use of personal pronouns like you, we, he, she, him, her, I, my, etc.

idioms, while interesting, really need to wait to much later in your learning. If you still can't write a couple of paragraphs without too much trouble, knowing complex idioms won't really serve to help you. Idioms are also highly dependent on where you're traveling. Learning British idioms when you mainly converse with North Americans won't really help you. I'm the first to admit that even though I watch a lot of British TV, there are plenty of slang words I don't understand and phrases they use which may leave me scratching my head.

So if you want to start that long road to english proficiency or need to get back on track, get out your grammar book and start practicing :)

I taught English to my daughter since she was 4 years old. Now she is ten and already has a good English conversational level. In that process I have never used any grammar book for her. She learned mainly through daily conversations and multimedia resources like English courses based on videos such as Magic English, Sesame English, etc. I think the important thing is to make the learning process be fun and perhaps to try to teach the language in a natural way, as you learn your mother tongue (please feel free to correct any error, I'm EFL learner).

Posted by pchamorro Nov 4th 2007

A grammar book was more of an example there. Some people may learn better in another way. However a child learning starting at the age of 4 is much different from an adult starting at the age of 16 or 20 or even older. They have done studies and shown examples of children who at the age of 6 are fluent in 4 or 5 languages. Young children have an amazing capacity to learn languages rapidly and retain the use of all them quite well. I'm glad the method worked for your daughter. In terms of how we learn our mother tongue, we often learn it through school and English textbooks. While we learn basics at home and through daily conversation we often don't understand the reason behind many rules and when faced with new words we often make mistakes until we understand the rules themselves. In fact I will often see people who seem to speak fine, but when tasked with writing 4 or 5 paragraphs, they will be unable to do so in a legible manner. The videos like Magic English and Sesame English replaced the textbooks that adults are more likely to use. I've tried to turn a few of my students on to watching Sesame street for listening practice as its more appropriate to their level, but I think as adults, they feel a bit silly watching children's shows.

Posted by crossmr Nov 4th 2007

Thank you for clarifying things. Perhaps my comment was because many people study only grammar and barely can speak in English. In my country, at school we were taught only grammar because that is what our schools and high school teachers are able to teach. Grammar can result boring if not taught properly. The important thing is to know there are more than one valid method or methodology for learning/teaching a language, if you are having trouble with your learning perhaps you should look for alternatives.

Posted by pchamorro Nov 5th 2007

I agree with all your viewpoints: Just for the benefit of the readers, here a different opinion about grammar, that can be interesting for somebody:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/effortlessenglish/Why_Grammar_Is_Bad.mp3

Thank you.

Posted by pchamorro Nov 5th 2007

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