MYTH ABOUT LEARNING A LNAGUAGE

The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it"

This is probably the most frequently repeated piece of advice for language learners. You will hear it from teachers, webmasters of ESL sites, and people in the Antimoon Forum (e.g. see Jeff Hook's posts in this discussion).

For most language teachers, the goal is to have you talking as early as possible and as much as possible. They believe that they should be quiet during their classes, while their students should have the opportunity to speak.

Fact:
Speaking is imitation. When you speak your native language, you don't make up your own grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. You use the same grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation as people around you.

Similarly, when trying to speak a foreign language, your goal is to imitate the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of native speakers, so that your way of speaking is correct and natural.

It's pretty obvious that, in order to talk like the native speakers, you have to listen to the things they say and read the things they write. When you do so, you learn new words and grammar structures that you can use to express your thoughts. As a result, it becomes easier and easier for you to build your own sentences in the foreign language.

By contrast, if you follow the popular advice and concentrate on speaking rather than listening and reading, you will learn few new words and structures and, like so many learners, will be stuck with your limited vocabulary and grammar. It will always be hard for you to express your thoughts in the foreign language.

Benefits of speaking

While speaking practice does not develop your vocabulary or grammar, it does offer a few important benefits:

· It helps improve your fluency (moves your knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation from your "slow memory" to your "quick memory" — however, first you must put something in your "slow memory" through input)

· Communicating in a foreign language is quite exciting and motivates you to keep learning

· It helps expose gaps in your vocabulary and grammar (shows you what you don't know and encourages you to look it up)

What you should do

· If you don't know how to begin your sentence, even after thinking for a while,

· If you stop in the middle of a sentence, and can't continue because you don't know a word,

· If you produce awkward-sounding sentences because you don't know how to say something in a natural way,

· If you often make mistakes and are not aware of it,

...you need more input, not more speaking practice. Such problems show that you simply don't know how to say certain things in the language, and should look at how native speakers say them. More speaking will not improve your vocabulary and grammar; actually, it can make things worse.

From the very beginning, you should spend all of your time on reading and listening (thus acquiring the necessary vocabulary and grammar) until you can write a few simple — but 100% correct — sentences in the language. For example, you can start by writing an e-mail message to someone who speaks the language. (It doesn't matter how long it takes you to write that message. It may be two hours, if you have that kind of patience.)

At the same time, you should study the phonetics of the language, practice pronouncing its sounds, and learn the pronunciations of words.

Then, you should continue getting input and writing until you can produce simple and correct sentences without consulting the dictionary or the Web. This is when you should start speaking — again, slowly and carefully. However, you should still spend most of your time on reading and listening, because input is the only way to develop your vocabulary and grammar.

What happens in language classes

Sadly, the importance of input has been greatly underestimated in the past years. The monopoly of the Communicative Approach in English language teaching means that students are expected to speak in class and write compositions almost from the first lesson, even though they have had almost no chance to absorb the grammar and vocabulary of English. A typical teacher demands output from his students, but does nothing to ensure they have had enough input. A few hours of English classes every week, where the teacher tries to speak as little as possible (to give his students the opportunity to speak), are not nearly enough.

MYTHS ABOUT LEARNING A LANGUAGE

The best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country"

A lot of people seem to think that being in a foreign country means that you automatically learn the country's language well. Perhaps the most prominent people who believe in this "common-sense truth" are European parents who pay a lot of money to send their children to language schools in England, expecting that they will come back speaking fluent English.

Fact:
Most immigrants in America don't speak English very well, even after living there for 20 years. Many of them have been making the same basic mistakes for decades — for example, saying things like "He make tea?" instead of "Did he make tea?" or "I help you" instead of "I will help you". They typically speak with strong accents, which enables others to instantly classify them as Asians, Latinos, Russians, etc.

The reason immigrants don't do anything about their grammar and pronunciation is that there is little pressure to do so. Other people can understand them despite their mistakes (sometimes with some effort), and are normally too polite to correct them.

The example of immigrants in America reveals a truth that many language learners find quite shocking: that living in a foreign country simply does not make you speak the country's language well. It does not force you to learn good grammar, good pronunciation, or a large vocabulary, because you can do quite well without those things in everyday life. For example, you can skip all your articles when speaking English ("Give me apple", "Watch is not good") and still be able to shop in America or Britain without much trouble.

Being in a foreign country only forces you to learn what is necessary to survive — the ability to understand everyday language and just enough speaking skills to order pizza and communicate with your co-workers or co-students. The rest is up to you, your motivation and ability to learn — which means that you're not much better off than someone who's learning the language in his own country.

In addition, being in a foreign country often forces you to say incorrect sentences, because it forces you to speak, even if you make a lot of mistakes. When you're in a foreign country, you cannot decide that you will temporarily stop talking to people and focus on writing practice (which would enable you to learn correct grammar better than speaking, because you could take as much time as you needed to look up correct phrases on the Web or in dictionaries). You have to speak, because your life depends on it.

By making mistakes, you reinforce your bad habits, and after a couple of years of saying things like "He make tea?", it's really hard to start speaking correctly. It is important to remember that native speakers will not correct your mistakes. Instead, they will try to be nice and try to understand you, no matter how bad your grammar is.

Conclusions

While going to another country may seem like a sure-fire way to master a foreign language, it is not so. Without sufficient motivation, you will learn very little and are likely to end up speaking in an understandable way, but with lots of mistakes. On the other hand, if you have the motivation, you might as well simulate a foreign-language environment in your own home with foreign-language TV and the Internet. Such an environment will be safer, because it will not force you to speak and reinforce your mistakes. Instead, you can learn at your own pace and concentrate on pronunciation,input and writing before you start speaking.

The advantages of going abroad are:

· easy access to native speakers that you can converse with (though you can also find natives in your own country, or you can just talk with someone who's learning the same language)

· the opportunity to perfect your listening skills (trying to understand English-language TV and movies is not quite the same as trying to understand the speech of a teenaged supermarket clerk in Frederick, Maryland)

· the opportunity to learn useful everyday words which are not frequently heard on TV or in movies, e.g. Kleenex, ATM, carpool, parking space, detergent, deli, cereal.

All things considered, learning in your own country will be a safer (and cheaper) option than going abroad, assuming you can motivate yourself and can find opportunities to speak in the language you're learning. After you've learned to speak the language fluently, you can go abroad to polish your listening skills and make your vocabulary a bit more native-like.