Now that I am a teacher, I understand what the nuns were saying back in
grade school: “Children learn by listening, not by speaking.”
But I couldn’t here them, because I was too busy talking.Actually, I
was imitating The Fonz from the “Happy Days,” TV show. While I was
saying his catch phrases, “Ayyyy!” and “Woaaaaa”, the other kids were
learning useful tidbits of Americana like, ‘what year was Benjamin
Franklin elected
president?’ because I wasn’t listening, I thought the answer was 1789.
But actually, the answer was, “never.”
You see, I should have been listening.
Stephen Krashen, one of the world leading linguists, proposed the
“comprehension hypothesis” (or "input hypothesis") which is a smart-guy
way of saying, “you learn by listening and reading, not by speaking and
writing.”
Speaking is the cream. It’s the icing on the cake. In fact, you don’t
even need to ever do it, to learn a foreign language. The learning comes
through listening and reading. If you start talking too early, the
danger is that you will speak incorrectly. You will have grammatical and
pronunciation errors which will become fossilized over a period of time.
Another issue is that many learners use speaking as a defense mechanism.
To try and avoid having a native speaker say something to them that they
don’t understand, they dominate the conversation.
Teaching in Taiwan, I see this behavior with many of my Chinese
counterpart English teachers. They are so terrified that I will say
something which makes it obvious that their English is lacking, they
dominate the conversation. Sometimes I can’t even get a word in
edgewise, which could be very frustrating when you are trying to
coordinate your teaching syllabus or explain to someone that they are on
fire and need to drop and roll.
Another annoying thing that learners will do is laugh at everything you
say. The strategy here is that, if they aren’t sure what you said, it
may be a joke. And if they were told a joke, but they didn’t laugh, then
people would find out that they didn’t understand. So, they just laugh
at everything.
Sometimes, to amuse myself, I will sharp-shoot my coworkers by telling
them something tragic, but using vocabulary they couldn’t possibly
know.For example, I will say, “My mother is demised. She was engulfed in
a raging inferno and had to be euthanized.”
That one really breaks them up around the office. Actually, in addition
to the comic value of saying something like this to a coworker, it also
becomes a sort of honesty test. If they laugh, I know they are full of
rice droppings. But if they say, “Sorry, I don’t know several of those
words, please restate.” Then I know they are honest and willing to
learn. But this is the smallest number of cases. Normally they just
chuckle and say something like, “Yes, paper is sometimes made of rice in
China.”
All playful xenophobia aside, the point is, we learn by listening or
reading input. These learners have demonstrated to me that they have
stopped listening. Someone who chuckles at your comment and walks away,
or quickly changes the subject, has already reached the pinnacle of
their English. They
have stopped learning. No matter how many more years they spend
listening, their English will not get any better.
Just in the interest of fairness, I see foreigners do this in Chinese
too.Just today, I saw a café owner ask a foreign customer, “Do you want
soy milk or whole milk in your coffee.” The foreigner just smiled, said
“yes, yes.” and then checked his cell phone for messages.
We can’t reject the input or we stop learning.
I know several foreigners who have been here for ten, fifteen, or even
twenty years. Some of them are married to Taiwanese. And yet, after only
a few months of study, I see my Chinese level passing theirs. One
simple, mathematical reason for this is hours spent. If you hang out
with someone, or even live with your spouse, how many hours per day are
you actually speaking? In a Chinese lesson, one on one, we spend a solid
two hours talking and listening. That is a lot more than many couples
talk to each other each day.
Then, when I sit down to do my homework, I have another three solid
hours of input. No matter who you are living with, they won’t be giving
you three hours of input. The input I get from my books is perfect in
that the new words introduced in the vocabulary section are repeated in
the reading and again in the grammar exercises. Slowly, methodically, my
vocabulary, grammar, and usage are growing through repetition.
Living with someone you would also get repetition. And in the short
run you would see your language improve dramatically. But after the
initial spike, you would level off. There are certain phrases or certain
topics that would make up the bulk of domestic conversation. Once you
had mastered those, most of your learning would be done. That is why the
foreigner living in Taiwan for three years maybe be at the same level
after five years or ten years.But this is not true of people who study.
For the above mentioned reasons, I believe that reading is more
important than listening. But, of course, if you don’t practice
listening, you will never have good pronunciation. Whether through
listening or reading, however, if a word is not in your brain, you
simply cannot hear it.
However, native speakers don’t learn idioms by reading books about
idioms. They learn them by reading books about gardening, hunting,
baking, stock investing, and how-to make hats out of old tires. You also
learned idioms by watching movies about car chases, wars in space,
searches for lost relics, Kazak journalists touring America, and severed
hands that crept along the ground and strangled people.
When I hear the CNN journalist say: “The tale of how this woman overcame
every manner of adversity to build her small business into one of
Africa’s leading corporations is a real Rocky Story.” I understand what
he means by “Rocky Story,” not because I read it in an idiom book, but
because I saw “Rocky” 29 times.
Reading and listening your whole life put English sounds, vocabulary,
and grammar in your head. When you first started speaking, all you did
was activate them. So, my best advice to people who want to learn a
foreign language is, Shut UP and LISTEN or read a book. The choice is up
to you.
Antonio
Graceffo is a martial arts and adventure author living in Asia. His
book, The Monk from Brooklyn, and all of his books, are available at
amazon.com. See his videos on youtube
Please buy many books by Antonio Graceffo, so he can afford to attend
graduate school.
His website is
www.speakingadventure.com
Join him on facebook.com
Contact Antonio:
antonio@speakingadventure.com
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