Throughout the month of January, we’re giving you some support with your new year’s resolutions by offering tips for learning new languages. Last week we looked at the best ways to practice listening in your new language and told you the best place to begin with your studies. Now that you’ve gotten started reading and listening in your new language, it’s time to get speaking.
We hear from so many people that the toughest thing for them when learning a new language is actually starting to speak. And yet, speaking is an absolutely essential part of the language learning process. Research shows that speaking is not just a way to show what you know; it’s a way of learning in its own right. Many argue that second language acquisition can’t happen without it. This idea was developed by a linguist called Merril Swain, and is called ‘the Output Hypothesis’ (output being a fancy way of saying ‘speaking.’) In this view, there are four reasons that speaking is essential for learning a new language:
1. It builds fluency.
The more you speak, the more automatic the process becomes. You’ve undoubtedly noticed if you’ve traveled or lived in a foreign country, the phrases you say the most often are the ones that are easiest to say because they are ‘burned into your brain.’ This is because you’ve automatized the process of calling up the right words and structures from your brain and putting them into speech. That’s what gives you fluency. The more you speak, the more fluent you become.
2. It allows you to test your ideas about how a language works.
You think you know how to use the pretérito, eh? Well, go ahead and give it a shot! The best way of testing your ideas about how a language works are to put them in action with a speaker of that language. When you engage in conversation, you are communicating meaning, of course, and grammar can affect that meaning. If you get it wrong, you often get a funny look or a confused answer from your conversation partner. If you are talking with a tutor, you might even get a full explanation of what you’re doing wrong. In any case, speaking serves the purpose of refining your ideas about how your new language works.
3. It helps you realize what you don’t know.
The experience often goes like this: You are speaking in your new language and you arrive at a point where you realize you’re lacking a vocabulary word, or you’re not sure whether it’s better to use the preterite or imperfect past, or how to pronounce something you’ve read often. In other words, you’ve noticed a gap in your knowledge. What to do? Well, you have lots of possibilities. In a tutoring session, you could just ask for help. If you’re in an immersion setting, i.e. traveling in a foreign country, you might have to wait until someone fills the gap for you. For instance, you’re in line at a cafe in France and realize, you don’t know how to say ‘pay by credit card’ (which you would like to do). You could step aside and pretend to look at something interesting on the wall while you listen for someone else in line to use the phrase you’re searching for. Either way, usually you are able to find the answer in your environment. But you wouldn’t have even known what to look for had you not been forced to speak. Et voilà le noticing function.
4. It’s a chance to talk about the language you’re learning.
This is called the ‘metalinguistic’ function of speaking, which is a big word for a simple concept: the ability to think about language. We do it all the time when we learn a language. We think about the fact that the gender of nouns is totally weird and arbitrary when we learn that the German word for girl Mädchen is neuter and not feminine (scratches head). We realize that there is a difference between a trilled r like in perro (dog) and a flapped r like pero (but), which we have to work on pronouncing properly. These realizations are more likely to happen when we speak, and furthermore, once we realize them, it’s helpful to talk about them with other speakers or tutors. It helps us understand the language even more fully by building our metalinguistic skills (knowledge about language).
So, now that you’re convinced that speaking is an absolute must for learning a language, let’s put our Lesson plan for week 3 together, with some helpful tips on how to get speaking in a low-stress environment.
Lesson Plan for Week 3
1. Once you’ve completed Lessons 1 and 2 of Essential, you’re ready for an e-Tutoring session. You can purchase credits if you don’t have any already on our website. Then sign up for your 30 minute practice session.
E-tutoring is a perfect way to start speaking because it is designed to let you show off what you already know (even if it seems like you don’t know much!) In your session, your tutor will use the chat box and an image chosen to showcase the new grammar and vocab you’ve just learned in lessons 1 and 2 to get you speaking in a low-stress, supportive environment.
2. Before your e-tutoring session, go through the flashcards and practice saying the phrases aloud and listening to the native speaker audio after as a comparison. The more you say these phrases aloud, the more fluently they will come in the session.
3. Go to the conversations in lessons 1 and 2 and listen to them once. Then turn off the auto-play setting and practice taking part in the conversation. Click on one bubble, then say the response on the next bubble yourself. You can click on the bubble afterwards to compare what you just said to the native speaker audio.
4. Practice introducing yourself. You have learned some basic phrases for giving information about yourself. Put them into practice with your own information. Getting these phrases down ahead of time will make having a conversation less daunting.
Next week: Tips on Repetition.
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