Today I'm going to share with you my absolute best tip. And it's an important one.
To speak better, you need to READ and LISTEN more.
Do you remember the way adults told you stories as a young child?
My dad's bedtime stories were the best (sorry mum 😚). Maybe it’s because he performed all the voices.
The books adults read to us contained colourful pictures, simple words, songs, etc. The adults themselves used gestures, funny faces, and voices - anything to make the stories come alive in our young imaginations.
The stories were fun and we understood them, which accomplished two very important requirements for language development.
When we read and listen to material (i.e. receive 'input') that is:
a) Comprehensible
b) Interesting
we subconsciously and easily acquire both vocabulary and grammar in our target language.
Bedtime stories are just one example, but if we listen to enough comprehensible input we can acquire any language, just like we acquired our first.
Don't I need to speak to improve my speaking skills?
In short. Yes.
We need to speak a lot.
I’ll address this topic fully in a future post, but for now, let leading linguist and educational researcher Steven Krashen give us an overview:
"We acquire language and develop literacy from input. From understanding what we hear and what we read, not from speaking and writing. Our ability to speak and write fluently and accurately is the result of acquiring language from input."
Or in other words...
Output comes from Input
An Input-Based Approach in the Real World
Researcher and English teacher Beniko Mason teaches Japanese adults with a method that consists of roughly 80% reading and 20% listening. There is no grammar study and no requirement to speak or write in English.
Learners read commercially available graded readers which are supplemented by a comprehensible 'story listening' class provided by Mason.
Here are the learners’ expected levels after each semester (15 weeks):
Semester 1 | Elementary/A2 level graded readers |
Semester 2 | Intermediate/B1 level graded readers |
Semester 3 | Upper/B2 level graded readers |
Semester 4 | Around 7% of the learners will be able to read easier, authentic books for young native adults (the Harry Potter series is a good example of this genre). |
According to Mason’s results, a reader can move from a beginner level (A1) to the threshold of 'International Proficiency' (C1) on the TOEIC exam in 1095 hours of reading.
Japanese and English are very different from each other, which accounts for the relatively long time needed to reach this level.
If, however, your first language is more closely related to English (like Spanish) you have a clear advantage. In this case it may only take you 300-400 hours of reading to achieve a similar result.
I love this quote from one of Mason’s research papers:
“When Japanese college students read books, their average gain on the TOEFL test was as much as the gains made by international students at an Intensive English Program on a US university campus.” (Mason, 2006).
If you’d like to hear more from one of Mason’s students, Kenta Kobayashi shares his experience on Mason's website (and you can read this study in case the link above is down).
So that’s it for today folks.
I hope you find the information in today’s post as useful as it has been for me.
In my next post I’ll discuss one of the biggest frustrations we face as learners: