28/04/2017
NEW HORIZENS AWAIT, WHEN YOU REACH ENGLISH FLUENCY THE BRIAN IELTS WAY. Do you wonder why English is a hard language to learn? The answer is simple: too many rules, the obstacles to fluency. The only way you can be confident of your speaking ability is by learning it the same way native speakers do - by talking to other native speakers of English, whose speech you want to imitate. Native speakers of all languages are fluent in their mother tongue before they start school, about age 6 or 7. This means they must learn it in about 3 years or less, because brain development is not adequate to support language processing any earlier than age 2.5, although children do listen, learn a lot and form some simple words before then.
So why can't university students become fluent in English with 3 years of study? After all, they are more intelligent than 3 years olds, aren't they? Well, yes, some of them are! But the problem is that in university and language school teaching systems they focus on language rules that the student must learn, in the mistaken belief that knowing those rules enhances the language learning process. This is the fatal mistake in all of the English programs in colleges and language schools.
As Noam Chomsky said long ago and many educators still ignore: “We don’t learn language from grammar; we learn grammar from language.” He meant this literally in the individual sense, as well as in the human species. This idea was repeated by the famous EU translator, Kato Lomb, the Hungarian woman who mastered more than 16 European languages, plus Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, without ever attending any language school or course.
The only students of these institutions who become fluent in English are those who learn outside of the classrooms and outside of the methods used to teach them in those places. The reason they are able to do that is because of their contacts with and conversations with native speakers via some form of media or in person to person, face to face, spoken exchanges of language.
And why are there so many seemingly contradictory rules, and so many exceptions to every rule in English? The reasons arise from history. There is a misperception that the English language developed naturally over hundreds of years, as most languages do. This is absolutely a false assumption. English has historically been a rampant thief and robber and avid collector and importer of other languages. English has been a language of conquest, since the days of the Saxons, when it first began. The Saxons first overpowered the Celts (original inhabitants of the British Isles) and imposed their language; the Romans overpowered the Saxons (although not in all areas) and imposed their language; the Danes and the Norse (Vikings) overpowered the cultural remains of the Romans and imposed their language; the Norman French overpowered the English and brought their language - you get the idea, right? And each time, although something of the old vocabularies and forms remained, language was dramatically modified.
Then, beginning in the Seventeenth Century with the advent of the Royal British Navy, England became the United Kingdom and dominated vast areas of the Earth, from Hong Kong and Singapore, to America, to India and South Africa. From each new part of the United Kingdom came not only valuable trade goods, but also much new vocabulary and many new linguistic features.
A similar thing happened in America, as the United States achieved its independence in 1776, and even in Canada, which remained in the British Commonwealth, as these new nations experienced trade, social contact, and in many cases, conflicts, with the native nations of North America. Contact, interaction and conflict with Mexico also resulted in a large influx of Spanish words and forms. This is one of the distinguishing features between British and American English today, that many words in the American lexicon derived locally, are not found in British English and most of those Spanish or native American words, such as "manana" and "moccasin" have never migrated into British English.
Sorry about the history lesson, but this is the evidence that the development of English in all places has been atypical, not how other languages develop. Although most cultures do have some interaction with "outsiders," that interaction has rarely been as pronounced and continuous with other languages as it has been with English, ever since the very beginning until the present age. This process even continued in the Twentieth Century with words migrating from Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and most recently from Arabic and Urdu, especially in the American version of English.
So again, why is English hard to learn? Secondly, perhaps more specifically, because it has too many forms, too much irregular vocabulary and many varied structures to master by learning rules. When an American child, age 2.5 begins to speak, he chooses the words and structures that are useful to him and ignores the others. His brain intuits the rules he needs to make others understand him. He doesn't even give names to these rules, but he knows them.
Don't take me wrong or dispute with me about the need for rules of grammar and the need for academic words. Sure, for those students who want to pursue the highest academic levels, then they will need to learn to write correct English and acquire some academic vocabulary. But even they, do not need to learn all of the language rules and the entire academic corpus of thousands of words in all of the academic word families. I have been teaching English for decades and will frankly admit that I do not know all of the rules or all of the academic vocabulary. For most people, and even for me, this is not required. What is required is confidence that they can express themselves vocally in a way that English listeners will understand.
This is the reality that I recognize and try to replicate in my teaching of foreign students. Avoid teaching grammar to the maximum extent possible, Avoid overloading and drowning students in thousands of new words. Help them to use, refine and organize the vocabulary they already have, which is usually adequate to express their meaning, if they can forget about trying to remember thousands of grammar rules. So, let's get the linguistically moribund mind out of its rule-bound wheelchair and get it leaping into new horizons of active speech, conversation and interaction with people everywhere around the world.
