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Step 2 – English Overview
My Observations
The million dollar question: How is it that a student can study English through junior high and high school and not be able to speak English? This question needs to be answered on the way to English fluency, otherwise the goal may not be achieved.
Common ESL/EFL English teaching methods prioritizes the teaching of English as follows or a combination thereof:
1. Grammar
2. Writing
3. Listening
4. Speaking
As a result of this strategy, students can have very good writing skills with correct grammar usage but find difficulty understanding spoken English.
Let’s examine how native speakers learned to speak English.
1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Writing
4. Grammar
As children we listened to certain words and made a connection with object and the things we wanted. If a child sees a cookie and wanted one, all that had to be said was, “Cookie” and the parent knew that the child wanted a cookie.
Later it was learned that “I” means “me” so the child says, “I cookie.” The next word for the child to learn was “want” and the sentence is correct by the child saying, “I want cookie” afterwards the article “a” is inserted before cookie and the sentence is grammatically correct by the child saying, “I want a cookie.”
The child had no idea about nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjective, second conditional this or that and did not take a class in grammar or English 101 but learned to get what was wanted by learning what words to use and when to use them.
Granted, the child has an advantage because of the English speaking environment that lends itself to learning English as well as the age of the child that is developing language acquisition.
However, an adult has an advantage over the child by possessing a mature understanding of things and increased knowledge that can be used to leverage the learning of an additional language.
Adult Learning Fast Track
Now let’s look at another scenario involving adults who became fluent in English within 6-12 months. How is this possible? They had to acquire English because their life or livelihood depended on it.
If an employer says, “You have to learn to speak English fluently within 6 months as a condition of employment.” Guess what? You’ll learn to speak English within 6 months and you won’t be spending your time specializing in grammar. You’ll focus your attention on words related to your job and not spend time trying to memorizing the meaning of 10,000 words that are not relevant to your job.
Like the child who says, “cookie” to the parent, this English learner will learn to say “Good morning” “Where is the light switch?” “Good morning” ”See you later” or “what time is lunch?” It is much easier to learn phrases than it is to learn individual words and trying to decide how to place it within a sentence and be grammatically correct. The grammar can be corrected along the way. The main thing is to speak in a manner to be understood by the listener and to understand the speaker smoothly.
Consider the lyrics of some musicians:
Carlos Santana “I ain’t got nobody that I can depend on, I ain’t got nobody that I can depend on…”
Diana Ross - “Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you babe!”
The Rolling Stones - “I can’t get no satisfaction”
The English listeners of these songs knew exactly what was meant in the lyrics despite the incorrect grammar. However, let me qualify my purpose for mentioning these lyrics. Grammar is important but it’s not the end of the world if all speech is not grammatically correct.
Keep first things first and speaking is more important than writing.
Consider this story:
I received an email from a Chinese reader who told me she had an invitation for a job interview with a pharmaceutical company. She arrived at the interview and the interviewer started to ask her certain questions but said that she had to answer the questions in English. She literally froze up. She said she knew the answer but couldn’t put it into English. She didn’t say if she got the job.
In the final analysis, I’ve said all of that to say this, you may want to consider rebalancing your English learning priorities to be less of an English student and more of an English speaker. If you’re preparing to take an English test for college or some other English aptitude test, use good judgment if you intend to implement my suggestions.
Mabtab and Meyban, thanks for your feedback.
Step 3 will be on basic grammar review and related items.
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