My (almost) perfect student makes the same mistakes again and again - here's why

Let’s look at a familiar scenario for many of us:

You’re talking to your language teacher who is kind (or cruel) enough to point out your mistakes. You feel quite happy with yourself during the conversation...

- You express all of your ideas quite well, your teacher understands you, you don’t hesitate too much. It’s a good, enjoyable conversation.

But afterwards, when you see the long list of mistakes you made your heart sinks.

”#$%&!”

Just when you thought you were finally making progress, your ego shrivels into a corner like a forgotten birthday balloon.

“How did I make all those mistakes!?”

And you know what the worst part is?

You know how to correct most of your errors.

So why does this happen?

Here’s the short answer:

You haven't ACQUIRED that language yet

Ennio (not his real name) was a student of mine from Rome back in 2015. We used to meet once a week on Skype when meeting online was still an unusual thing. Ennio was brilliant at grammar exercises and any kind of test I could throw at him. His ability to produce grammatically correct sentences was impressive too.

A model student in many ways. 

The problem was that it took him AGES to say a single sentence. Literally 30 seconds or longer to express a thought! 

Fine for our 1-1 classes, but completely impractical in the real world.

Ennio had only ever learned English consciously - with grammar exercises and memorisation techniques - so every word and sentence he uttered had to first pass through his conscious brain’s monitor. He might use the monitor before or after he spoke, but it was always present.

When he arrived at a verb in a sentence I could almost read his thoughts as he scanned slowly…

…methodically…

…down a mental list of conjugations… 

eat

ate

eaten

fly

flew

flown

write

wrote 

written

The price Ennio paid for his accuracy was a lack of fluency. 

He couldn’t retrieve English words from his rapid-access memory the same way he could with Italian.

Almost 10 years later the solution to Ennio’s problem seems obvious to me now:

More: subconscious acquisition (through hundreds of hours of input).

Less: conscious learning.

Conscious learning has its place of course. It’s great for subjects like mathematics and the sciences when you have lots of time to retrieve information from your memory. But if you actually want to communicate with people, it’s MUCH less useful for languages.

So…we were speaking about mistakes…

Why You Keep Making the Same Mistakes

Subconscious language emerges quickly and automatically.

When we haven’t fully acquired a piece of language in English we may do one of two things:

1. Use the nearest equivalent in our first language.

2. Overapply an English rule we have learned. For example: learners develop the ability to use the past forms of irregular verbs earlier than the regular verb ending of '-ed'. When learners start to use the '-ed' ending, they often overapply this rule to previously learned past forms of irregular verbs. E.g. I ate, becomes the incorrect I eated. This looks like regression, but in fact, it is evidence of a later stage of language development.

The language appears to escape from our subconscious.

Here’s what example 1 looks like in practice:

SPANISH	INCORRECT ENGLISH	CORRECT ENGLISH
Estaba pensando en ti.	I was thinking in you.	I was thinking about you.
Éramos tres en el restaurante.	We were three in the restaurant.	There were three of us in the restaurant.
Quiero que mi jefe me deje en paz.	I want that my boss leaves me alone.	I want my boss to leave me alone.

Conscious learning is like a dangerous shortcut - you might arrive at your destination, you might not - but acquisition is the longer, tried and tested path to communicative ability. 

Consider this:

Is our ancestral human ability to speak due to word lists and grammar exercises, or to communication with other human beings?

In my next post, I'll show you how to identify optimal input (listening and reading) and reveal how much you REALLY need to progress to each level.