Listening - The Teacher Side

Teaching Listening Better: Is Listening being taught as well as it could be?

In Listening classes, students are usually given practice in listening but they are not actually taught listening. Practice is not enough.

Research and case studies have told us many things about how listening should be taught. But often, this knowledge has not made the jump into classroom practice. While many classes are based on the idea of giving students lots of practice with English, research tells us that we also need to teach listening.

In addition to giving students plenty of listening practice. We should also break the skill of listening into micro-skill components and make sure that our students are aware of what they need to know to understand how to listen to English.

A Teacher's Checklist
Students need to know and understand:

• how words link together (liaison)
• how vowels weaken (the central vowel)
• how sounds mix together (assimilation)
• how sounds disappear (elision)
• how syllables disappear (ellipsis)
• how helping sounds are used between vowel sounds (intrusion)
• how intonation helps with conversational turn taking (intonation)
• how stress signals new information (prominence)
• how to use grammar to help guess meaning (strategies)
• how to use discourse knowledge to help guess meaning (strategies)
• how to use knowledge of intonation and stress to guess meaning (strategies)

Do your students know all these features of natural English? They should.

Everyone knows that many Japanese say that 'listening' is their weak point with English. There is a very simple reason for this. Most Japanese students have never been taught how to listen to English. They have had practice but they have never actually been taught or given guidance about how to listen to English.

We, along with many of you, want to change this

What do we teach when we teach Listening?
When we teach listening we need to teach not only English, but we also need to teach how it is used. We need to teach both:

1. the language system, (our knowledge of language: grammar and vocabulary etc.) and
2. the use of the language system, (the skills of language use)

The problem with most listening classes, is that they get stuck at number 1. Too many classes concentrate on teaching the language system and miss the skills of language, in this case listening.

Our knowledge of the language system includes our knowledge of words, how these words are properly put in order (syntax or grammar), how these words are said in connected streams (phonology), how these words are strung together in longer texts (discourse) and so on.

Using the language system involves how we apply this knowledge of the language system to understand or convey meaning and how we apply particular skills to understanding and conveying meaning.

The Listening Skills (an all too often forgotten skill set)
Listening skills are often divided into two groups:

• bottom up listening skills and
• top down listening skills

Bottom up listening skills, or bottom up processing, refers to the decoding process, the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sound waves through the air, in through our ears and into our brain where meaning is decoded. To do this students need to know the code. How the sounds work and how they string together and how the codes can change in different ways when they're strung together. And most students have never been taught how English changes when it's strung together in sentences.

Top-down processing refers to how we use our world knowledge to attribute meaning to language input; how our knowledge of social convention helps us understand meaning.

These are the skills that listening teachers should be teaching in their classes but all too often are not. (Unless of course you are already using our listening textbook!!!) To offer a quote: "An understanding of the role of bottom-up and top-down processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension" (Richards, 1990:50). We agree.

The Default Method
In most classrooms around Japan, the common way to teach listening is to have students listen to some language tape, then the teacher asks a few comprehension questions. Did the students understand? No? Well ok, play the tape again. Ask the question again. Did they understand? No. Ok, well . . . tell them to practice and one day they'll get used to English and will be able to understand. Practice practice! Practice makes perfect.

Or you might pick out a particular grammar point. This passage uses the present perfect quite a bit, so you might go over some of the differences between the simple past and the present perfect. Maybe write a formula or two up on the board. This is the approach taken by most teachers and it is insufficient.

This might very well be a good grammar lesson but it's not listening. Students need to be told how English works and also how to use their knowledge to improve their skills. Yes practice makes perfect. But instruction can make this process happen much more efficiently. We need to teach our students.

Well known SLA (Second Language Acquisition) expert Richard Schmidt, has put forward a theory called the "Noticing Hypothesis", which states that learners have to notice something before they can learn it. And as such, we need to help our students notice language points. Teachers need to teach.

"There is support in the literature for the hypothesis that attention is required for all learning. Learners need to pay attention to input and pay particular attention to whatever aspect of the input (phonology, morphology, pragmatics, discourse, etc) that you are concerned to learn" (Schmidt: 1995)

An ideal listening class should thus provide both practice and instruction. Students need practice in listening for meaning and also some instruction about how to do so effectively.

"Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on either accuracy or fluency". (Lightbrown & Spada)

What Listening Teachers Need to Do
Give students practice in listenings which ask students to interpret and understand meaning, together with listenings which teach learners about how English is actually spoken. That is, students need practice in listening for meaning and instruction about how to do this, (a focus on form).

Such an approach has been the recommended method for teaching listening for years and yet the "Practice makes perfect plus a little grammar" approach is still common. We want to change this!

You've read our views. We'd now like to hear your views. Send us your comments and we'll post them here. Let's start a dialog and move our teaching forward. Help us to make things better.

A Teaching Method Supported by Second Language Acquisition Research
We've put together an annotated bibliography on teaching methods for listening. A read through these books and articles would certainly give the listening teacher a sound awareness of many of the issues facing them when teaching in the classroom. Another suggestion might be to use our textbook, Top-Up Listening. This is a book written by teachers, all with advanced qualifications in education and years of experience. Furthermore this book has been edited and tested by editors with advanced teaching qualifications in and years of experience. Top-Up Listening teaches listening in accordance with all that we know about teaching listening. In short this book teaches listening they way listening is supposed to be taught!

Source:
http://www.abax.co.jp

Como melhorar o Listening

Por Denilson de Lima

- "Denilso, pelo amor de Deus, o que eu faço para melhorar o meu listening? Eu estudo inglês a tanto tempo e até agora não consigo entender o que estes caras falam. Tem alguma dica aí pra mim, pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?"

Após uma rápida olhada pela internet notei que há um grande número de sites com dicas para melhorar o tal do listening (audição). Há sites com um número enorme de arquivos de aúdios e tudo mais! Os blogueiros também têm lá suas dicas e por ai vai!

Pergunto eu: o problema está onde? O que será que faz com muitos - ou a grande maioria - simplesmente ainda tenha dificuldades com o aterrorizante listening. Vejamos alguns dos problemas que eu acredito serem os possíveis causadores de tais dificuldades.

01) ANSIEDADE - Na maioria das vezes você como aluno fica ansioso demais. Está sua ansiedade cria certo bloqueio no cérebro. Geralmente, ocorre o seguinte diálogo interno "vixi, vou ter de ouvir isto mesmo? Mas, eu nunco entendo nada! Então, me lasquei!" Este modo de pensar já registra no seu inconsciente que você é incapaz de ouvir bem em inglês. Procure quebrar está ansiedade, relaxe, escute o texto naturalmente, não se afobe, não se desespere. Simplesmente, deixa o CD tocar, o filme passar, a pessoa falar. Você está aprendendo! Você ainda não é um expert! Acredite, até memso os experts cometem erros vez ou outra!

02) DESESPERO - Parece o mesmo tema de antes mas não é! Ao ouvir um texto, diálogo o que seja, você talvez se desespere ao achar que o cara fala rápido demais ou talvez por que não entendeu uma palavra, sei lá! Isto é normal no aprendizado. Mais uma vez relaxe! O que seu professor quer é que você identifique algumas informações aqui e ali! Principalmente aquelas que ele está trabalhando na sala de aula! Ele não quer que você no final da atividade faça um relatório detalhado sobre o que ouviu! Apenas as informações necessárias, solicitadas em uma atividade.

03) PÉSSIMO HÁBITO - Você talvez tenha o péssimo hábito de querer traduzir palavra por palavra. Aí, ao ouvir quer também ouvir palavra por palavra. Mas as coisas não são bem assim! Você precisa acostumar-se a ouvir expressões, combinações de palavras, sentenças freqüentemente usadas, etc. Claro que aprender palavras isoladas ajuda; porém, não é assim que a comunicação real ocorre. Acostume-se, portanto, a aprender e a ouvir expressões, collocations, sentenças comuns e completas. Isto fará com que você se acostume a ouvir e a falar mais rápido! Mas lembre-se, isto não vai acontecer de uma hora para outra. Você precisa pratica, praticar, praticar, praticar...

04) PREGUIÇA - Como eu disse antes a internet está repleta de recursos para ajudar você a ouvir inglês: podcasts, YouTube, arquivos para dowload, sites de rádios e televisão... Tudo isto repleto com entrevistas, bate-papo informal, programas sérios, etc, etc. O problema é que as pessoas têm preguiça de procurar por isto, têm preguiça de entrar em um site ou blog brasileiro que pode ajudá-lo a se organizar. Ou seja, esperam ir para cama um dia e acordar no próximo já ouvindo inglês perfeitamente bem! Isto simplesmente não vai acontecer! Só em sonho! É preciso arregaçar as mangas e meter a mão na massa!

05) DESPERDÍCIO DE TEMPO - A internet está aí para nos ajudar e não para roubar o nosso tempo! Então, é bom começar fazendo melhor uso desta ferramenta excepcional! Você está aqui agora lendo este post, isto significa que você está aproveitando seu tempo com algo útil! Aproveite também o tempo para ouvir inglês. Enquanto está ai conectado, baixe um aquivo de aúdio e fique ouvindo-o mesmo que você nada entenda. Fique ouvindo apenas, isto faz com que seus neurônios vão se acostumando com os sons da língua inglesa! Acredite!

Take care... and have a wonderful day!

(((((>>>>))))

Para mais artigos e dicas do autor, acesse:
http://denilsodelima.blogspot.com

The Right to be Wrong

Ser corrigido é um dos grandes males do ensino da língua inglesa, especialmente, se o estudante for um adulto. Explico: crianças e (pasmem) até adolescentes, são mais abertos para serem corrigidos; adultos, on the other hand, quando começam a ser corrigidos o tempo todo pelo professor ou por seus colegas de classes, acabam criando uma espécie de bloqueio (blockage) na fala que dificultará a sua comunicação, talvez pela vida inteira. Por isso e por ter sido um desses “bloqueados”, que costumo dizer aos meus Learners: “You’ve got the right to be wrong”, - você tem todo o direito de errar!

“I've got a right to be wrong

My mistakes will make me strong

I'm stepping out into the great unknown

I'm feeling wings though I've never flown”

Joss Stone

Ao falar isso, acabo quebrando um dos grandes paradigmas das escolas de idioma, que em suas regras, exigem que os professores não deixem os alunos falarem errado, pois de acordo com as escolas, o aprendizado de uma língua estrangeira precisa ser baseado sempre na gramática correta e na pronúncia perfeita; ora, isso é uma bobagem, principalmente se levarmos em conta que essas escolas utilizam a gramática e a pronúncia americana como padrão.

Hellooo!!!

Os tempos são outros, o mundo fala inglês, therefore, temos um caldeirão de sotaques e formas de comunicação que deixariam qualquer professor tradicional de book na mão.

Temos o direito de errar quando começamos a nos comunicar em inglês porque essa é a única forma de ganharmos confidence, aquela confiança que nos trará controle sobre o que falamos, como dizemos o que queremos contar e quando nos comunicarmos.

You have got all the right to be wrong porque até mesmo os falantes nativos erram também e não ficam com medo de se comunicar.

Isso, of course, não quer dizer que você tem que parar de aprender as formas cultas do idioma ou como as palavras são escritas e pronunciadas “corretamente”, quite the opposite, os estudos para um Learner são essenciais para que ele, step by step, possa dominar ainda mais a sua comunicação e conseguir se destacar como falante de um segundo idioma. Para tanto, é preciso que ele, first of all, se sinta confortável falando e usando o inglês sempre que ele pode, sem ficar bloqueado por uma tentativa inútil de estar correto o tempo todo.

Sim, para aprender inglês é preciso também enjoyment, aquele tipo de alegria que temos quando estamos fazendo algo que gostamos, sem termos a obrigação de ser assim ou assado. E como podemos ter esse enjoyment, sendo corrigidos o tempo inteiro?

Quanto mais divertido se tornar falar inglês para você, mais fácil ficará para você se comunicar em todos os níveis e mais confortável você se sentirá para praticar ainda mais.

Uma vez que você der esse salto para vencer o seu bloqueio, você passará a tercontrol sobre o seu aprendizado e perceberá quando e how corrigir a si mesmo (self-correction). Tendo conquistado isso, o caminho para a fluência do idioma estará aberto e você economizará todo o dinheiro que você pagaria para as escolas de inglês para continuar tentando se comunicar e vencer esse bloqueio.

Pensem no quanto vocês já gastaram e no quanto vocês gastariam... agora, tentem imaginar usando esse mesmo dinheiro para viajar e praticar output, comprar material bacana para aumentar o seu input e, why not, contratar um private tutorpara lhe ensinar seja lá o que você quiser aprender em inglês, just for the sake of it.

Espero que vocês tenham gostado da dica dessa semana, mas apenas façam um favor para mim: não digam as escolas que eu revelei isso, otherwise, I will be in trouble!!!

“I've got a mind of my own

I'm flesh and blood to the bone

I'm not made of stone

Got a right to be wrong

So just leave me alone”

Joss Stone

Professor Frank Oliveira

The power of reading — two cases

© Tomasz P. Szynalski, Antimoon.com

In his article The comprehension hypothesis and second language acquisition, Stephen Krashen (University of Southern California) describes two cases of students who completely changed their English because of reading:

The case of L.

This case was described in a paper by J. Segal (Summer Daze, written in 1997), and then by Stephen Krashen. We have shortened and simplified the original text.

L. was a 17 year old student in Israel. She spoke English at home with her parents, who were from South Africa. But she had serious problems in English writing, especially in spelling, vocabulary and writing style. Segal, who was L.'s teacher in grade 10, tried to help her in many ways:

"Error correction was a total failure. L. tried correcting her own mistakes, tried process writing, and tried copying words correctly in her notebook. Nothing worked. L.'s compositions were poorly written and her vocabulary was small. We discussed the format and ideas before writing. We made little progress. I gave L. a list of five useful words to spell each week for 6 weeks and tested her in a friendly way between classes. L. did well in the tests in the beginning, but after six weeks she started misspelling the words again." L.'s mother also got her a private teacher, but there was little improvement.

Segal also taught L. in grade 11. At the beginning of the year, she assigned an essay. "When I came to L.'s composition I stopped still. I was looking at an almost perfect essay. There were no spelling mistakes. The structure was clear. It was interesting and well-written. Her vocabulary had improved. I was surprised but at the same time uneasy ..."

Segal discovered why L.'s English improved so much: She had started reading books in the summer. L. told her, "I never read much before but this summer I went to the library and I started reading and I just couldn't stop." L.'s English in grade 11 was excellent and she kept reading.

The case of Cohen

This case was first described by Y. Cohen in a paper titled How reading got me into trouble (1997).

Beginning at age 12, Cohen went to an English-language school in Turkey. During the first two years, there were intensive English classes, and after only two months, Cohen started to read in English. "...as many books in English as I could get. I had a large library of English books at home ... I became a member of the local British Council's library and sometimes bought English books in bookstores ... By the first year of middle school I had become an enthusiastic reader of English."

Because of her reading, an unpleasant thing happened to her in middle school: "I had a new English teacher who assigned us two compositions for homework. The teacher returned them to me. She was angry and she wanted to know who had helped me to write them. They were my work. I had not even used the dictionary. She would not believe me. She showed me a few underlined sentences and some vocabulary and asked me how I knew them; they were more advanced than the level of the class. (...) I felt sad. I could not explain how I knew them. I just did."

Why your input should be fun

© Tomasz P. Szynalski, Antimoon.com

Regularity
Reading a boring text for the sake of learning English is not a good idea. When you do so, you're not just reading a boring text — you're reading a boring text that's hard to understand. Nobody's going to put up with that sort of torture for very long. You can go like that for a few days, if you're highly motivated, but not for a month.

And you don't need a way to learn English for just a few days. You've already studied English for a few days on a couple occasions and you probably know these irregular, one-time efforts don't work. You need to make a permanent change to your lifestyle to ensure steady improvement.

That is why you need super-fun, thrilling and funny sources of English. Your sources should be so cool that you will look forward to reading, watching or listening to them. You need something that will make you get your English input and develop your English every day.

Which sources of English are super-fun? The answer will be different for every learner. For example, I like watching Futurama and Desperate Housewives, movies by the Coen brothers and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the music of Radiohead and Pink Floyd, LucasArts adventure games, TED, and The Onion, among other things.

Dedication
Suppose you're a big fan of The Matrix. (If you're not a big fan of The Matrix, insert the name of your favorite movie.) When watching The Matrix, you can learn much more English than if you watched some random movie you don't care about.

You are more likely to watch the movie scene-by-scene, listening carefully to every line (or reading it, if you have a version with subtitles) and thinking about how it is phrased.
You are more likely to look up difficult phrases in a dictionary and add them to your SuperMemo collection.
You are more likely to practice your pronunciation by imitating lines said by your favorite characters (for example, Morpheus's "Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is.")
You are more likely to repeat your favorite lines to yourself, which means you'll be constantly reviewing the grammar and vocabulary contained in those lines.
Attitude to English
Finally, fun input lets you change your attitude to English. At first, you may think of learning English as a necessary evil — sort of like getting up and going to work every morning. But when you find enjoyable English-language books, movies, TV shows, websites, etc., learning English will become a way to have fun every day by reading a funny book, watching a cool movie, or communicating with someone you like.

When this happens, you will find it easy to study English, even in ways which are not strictly "fun", such as reading about English grammar.

Content or form?
Now you may have noticed that elsewhere on Antimoon I tell you to read with the goal of learning grammar and vocabulary. I tell you to analyze the grammar in the sentences you read. And now I seem to be telling you to read stuff because it is cool.

Of course, what I'm actually telling you is that you should read with both goals in mind. More precisely, when starting reading, concentrate on how fun the content is (e.g. how much you like the book). Starting is always the hardest part, which is why you will need compelling content to overcome your laziness.

However, once you start reading, do your best to read for form. Don't turn page after page in order to find out what happens next. Instead, read as slowly as you can, thinking about the phrases and grammatical structures used. Repeat them to yourself. You want to learn some English, remember?

What if you're a beginner?
When you are a beginner, you have a small vocabulary. In this state, reading books or watching movies is too difficult. Even if your content is extremely fun, the number of unknown words may make it impossible to enjoy it. You need input which will teach you new things, but not input in which everything is new.

Being a beginner, how can you take advantage of the benefits of fun input — regularity, dedication and improved attitude to English? The answer is "simplified books". These are popular books re-written in simple English especially for English learners. Thousands of titles are available at various difficulty levels. A well-known series is the Penguin Readers, available in bookstores worldwide.

I believe these books are the best way for a beginner to quickly develop his/her vocabulary and grammar skills. First, you can choose something you will love, because thousands of titles are available. Second, you will not get frustrated, because the number of new words and phrases will be limited. If you read these books regularly using the "pause and think" method, the progress you can make is amazing.

Some fun input ideas
English-language culture is extremely rich and very expansive, which, luckily for you, means that you should find it relatively easy to find enjoyable sources of input.

Here are some examples of content that you might possibly enjoy:

Simplified books (see above)
E-mail messages from a native speaker you know
Books: Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings, current bestsellers ...
Movies: The Matrix, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, current DVD bestsellers ...
News: Google News, BBC, CNN, The Independent ...
Encyclopedias: English Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia
Movie reviews: Roger Ebert, IMDB ...
Internet discussion: Reddit, Digg, Antimoon Forum ...
Video games with a lot of dialogue: Grand Theft Auto, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Half-Life, Mass Effect, Fallout ...
TV shows: talk shows (Leno, Letterman, Conan O'Brien), Top Gear, The Colbert Report, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Saturday Night Live ...
TV series: Desperate Housewives, House MD, Dexter, Futurama, The Simpsons, Californication, South Park ...
The Good News Bible (written in simple English)
Technology sites: Joel on Software, Tom's Hardware, Wired News, Engadget, Ars Technica, Eurogamer ...
Humor sites: The Onion, Dilbert, Something Awful ...

Why you need to take charge of your English learning

@ Tomasz P. Szynalski, Antimoon.com

Before you can start speaking and writing in English, you have to learn how things are said in English. You do this by getting input — reading and listening to the correct English sentences of other people (ideally, native speakers).

Most English learners get their input from English classes. In this article, I will argue that English classes simply do not give you enough input to speak English fluently, and that you need to get English input outside of the classroom if you want to be fluent. I will also give two other reasons to take things into your own hands and get English input on your own.

Amount of input
To speak English fluently1, you need a lot of input. I needed about 1,000,000 sentences over 3 years — on average, 6400 sentences per week — to get from basic reading skills and very poor speaking/writing skills to fluency. That's the equivalent of 60 pages2 and 6 hours of audio3 per week.

1 What do I mean by fluency? I mean being able to write and speak almost as easily — and almost as correctly — as in your native language. To be fluent, you don't need to speak with a native-like accent and you don't need to always choose the most natural way to say something.
2 By pages, I mean typical pages in a paperback book.
3 By hours of audio, I mean hours of non-stop talking, as in a radio interview.

If you want to become fluent, the question you need to ask yourself is: can English classes give me 60 pages and 6 hours of input per week? A typical English course consists of 2 lessons a week, 1.5 hours each. But let's assume you have the time and money to attend an intensive course — 4 times a week, 1.5 hours each.

In such a course, you spend 6 hours per week in class. How much input are you getting? Let's see:

Teachers provide little input. Most of them try to keep quiet and let the students talk. (This is supposed to help students speak sooner, but has the opposite effect.) When they speak, they speak quite slowly, with frequent pauses. 10 minutes of listening to a teacher gives you perhaps 5 minutes of "non-stop" input. In addition, some teachers like to switch to their native language instead of speaking English.
Other students also provide little input because they talk even more slowly than the teacher and they often make mistakes.
A lot of time is wasted on exercises that give you almost no input, for example: "divide these adjectives into two groups", "rearrange the words to make a sentence" or "answer these questions about the text above". There are also breaks, during which nothing happens.
If a text is read in class, it is typically very short (< 3 pages). If a recording is played, it is short as well (< 10 minutes).
If you consider all of the above, it becomes obvious that no more than 1/3 of the total lesson time is spent listening to correct English sentences. This includes recordings played by the teacher and correct sentences spoken by the teacher and other students. What about reading? The average amount of text that you read in an English class is probably no more than 3 pages per 45-minute lesson (including texts in the textbook and teacher handouts).

If you do the math, an intensive English course gives you no more than 2 hours of spoken input and 24 pages of written input per week. That's about 2,000 sentences per week. This means that it would take 9 years (with no breaks!) of intensive English courses to get 1,000,000 sentences. (With normal, twice-a-week courses it would take 18 years.)

Rate of input
Some of you may be thinking: "Great! So I will just take intensive courses for 9 years and become fluent in English!" Not so fast. You see, the total amount of input is not everything. You also need the right rate of input. A 100-meter walk is not the same as a 100-meter dash.

Why can't you get your input slowly? Because of forgetting. Here's how it works:

When you learn a new word, it stays in your memory for some time (usually 1-30 days) and then you forget it. For example, let's say the word is genuine and it will stay in your memory for 14 days.
How can you remember the word for more than 14 days? You need to review it. If you see another sentence with the word genuine in the next 14 days, your memory of the word will become stronger and you will remember it for a much longer time.
What is the chance that you will see another sentence with the word genuine in the next 30 days? It depends on how many English sentences you will see in that period. If you get 8,000 sentences (intensive English course), the chance of coming across genuine is about 3 times smaller than if you get 25,000 sentences (as I did).
Therefore, with less input, you are making it much more likely that the new word will be gone after 1-30 days.
So if you're getting your input slowly, you are hurting your progress in two completely separate ways:

You're learning new things more slowly.
You're accelerating forgetting. You're losing "old things" more quickly because you're not reviewing them often enough.
That is why a learner who gets 1,000,000 sentences over 9 years will achieve much less than a learner who gets 1,000,000 sentences over 3 years. The first learner will keep forgetting a large part of his knowledge because of insufficient reviews. The second learner will be getting more frequent reviews, so he will be losing less knowledge.

The bottom line is that English courses — even intensive ones — simply give you input too slowly to achieve fluency in a reasonable time (if at all). If you want to speak fluent English, you have to take things into your own hands and immerse yourself in input — podcasts and audiobooks, videos and movies, websites and books.

Fun
As I've explained above, I believe that getting input outside of the classroom is the only road to fluency. But there are reasons to get input on your own even if fluency is not your goal.

One such reason is fun. When you choose your own sources of input, you can choose things that you really care about. Instead of reading some random article in your English textbook, you can read a Harry Potter book, an e-mail message from a friend, an Internet forum with relationship advice, or perhaps news about your favorite football club. Instead of listening to a boring recording in class, you can watch your favorite TV series or a video podcast about computer technology.

Now, of course, fun is good in itself; but it also has beneficial effects:

If your input is fun, you get it much more willingly and spend more time on it. In fact, once you get a taste of all the amazing content you can get in English, it may be difficult to tear yourself away!
Fun leads to stronger memories. When you see or hear something that matters to you, you can remember much more. For example, if you're reading some article that your teacher gave you, you usually want to read it quickly and be done with it. But suppose you're reading the lyrics of a new song by your favorite band. You are much more likely to repeat them to yourself and keep them in your memory — together with all the grammar and vocabulary!
Authenticity
The final — and the least important — reason to take charge of your English learning is authenticity. I believe it is important to learn from real American and British content instead of resources prepared especially for English learners. If you hear something in a podcast or read it on a blog, you know it is really used in the English-speaking world.

By contrast, textbooks used in English classes often try to teach "proper" English, stripped of any informal expressions, such as crap, sucks or stuff. Their authors probably disapprove of such phrases and believe that learners don't need them. But most learners would choose relaxed, natural language — the language of regular educated Americans and Britons — over the artificial language of English textbooks.

A related problem is that English teaching is dominated by British English, while the real world is dominated by American English. Although in recent years British textbooks (and teachers) have started teaching American vocabulary, they still treat American English as a second-class citizen. If you want to get an accurate picture of the language used in the English-speaking world, you will need to go beyond English classes and start getting real-life input on your own.

What is input and why you need it

© Tomasz P. Szynalski, Antimoon.com

What is input?
Input is a short word for "sentences that you read or listen to". Input is the opposite of output, which means "sentences that you speak or write".

The model of language learning
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that you can speak your native language so easily? You want to say something (express some meaning) and correct phrases and sentences just come to you. Most of this process is unconscious: something just appears in your head. You can say it or not, but you don't know where it came from. This model explains how this is possible:

You get input — you read and listen to sentences in some language. If you understand these sentences, they are stored in your brain. More specifically, they are stored in the part of your brain responsible for language.
When you want to say or write something in that language (when you want to produce output), your brain can look for a sentence that you have heard or read before — a sentence that matches the meaning you want to express. Then, it imitates the sentence (produces the same sentence or a similar one) and you say your "own" sentence in the language. This process is unconscious: the brain does it automatically.
Comments on the model
Of course, this model is very simple. The brain doesn't really look for whole sentences, but rather for parts of sentences (phrases). It can build very complicated and long sentences from these parts. So it doesn't just "imitate" one sentence at a time. It uses many sentences at the same time to build original sentences.

For example, it "knows" that it can take one word in a sentence it has heard and substitute another word (an equivalent one) for it. For example, if it has heard "The cat is under the table", it can easily produce "The dog is under the table" or "The book is under the chair." (if it has also heard and understood the nouns dog, book, and chair). It can substitute more than one word, as in "The cat is under the big black table".

The brain can also do more advanced transformations. If you give the brain these three sentences,

I like golf.
I like fishing for salmon.
Golf is relaxing.
it can produce this:

Fishing for salmon is relaxing.
Here, a noun phrase with a gerund ("fishing for salmon") was substituted for a regular noun (golf). As a result, we got an original sentence which doesn't look too similar to any of the three input sentences.

But these considerations don't change the most important fact: The brain needs input. The more correct and understandable sentences it gets, the more sentences it can imitate and the better it gets at making its own sentences.

By the way, the language learning model described above is basically the "comprehension hypothesis" (or "input hypothesis") by professor Stephen Krashen (University of Southern California) and is part of his "natural approach" to language learning.

The model describes the process of a child learning its first (native) language. The child listens to its parents and other people. The child's brain collects sentences and gets better and better at producing its own sentences. By the age of 5, the child can already speak quite fluently.

But the same model works for learning a foreign language. In fact, we think it is the only way to learn a language well.

What the model means for language learners
Here's what's important in the model from the point of view of foreign language learning:

The brain produces sentences based on the sentences it has seen or heard (input). So the way to improve is to feed your brain with a lot of input — correct and understandable sentences (written or spoken). Before you can start speaking and writing in a foreign language, your brain must get enough correct sentences in that language.
Output (speaking and writing) is less important. It is not the way to improve your language skills. In fact, you should remember that you can damage your English through early and careless output.
You don't need grammar rules. You learned your first language without studying tenses or prepositions. You can learn a foreign language in that way, too.
How input can change your English
If you read a few books in English, you will see that your English has become better. You will start using new vocabulary and grammar in your school compositions and e-mail messages. You will be surprised, but English phrases will just come to you when you are writing or speaking! Things like the past simple tense and how to use the word since will become part of you. You will use them automatically, without thinking. Correct phrases will just appear in your head.

It will be easy to use English, because your brain will only be repeating the things that it has seen many times. By reading a book in English, you have given your brain thousands of English sentences. They are part of you now. How can you make a mistake and say feeled, if you have seen the correct phrase (felt) 50 times in the last book you've read? You simply cannot make that mistake anymore.

You will surely notice an improvement at your next English test. For example, in multiple choice questions, you will "feel" which is the correct answer. You may not know "why" it is correct (you will not be able to give a rule for it), but you will know it is correct. You will know because you will have read it many times.

This is true for all words and grammar structures. If you read in English, you can forget about grammar rules. Throw away your grammar book! You don't need to know the rules for the present perfect tense. You don't even have to know the name "present perfect tense". Instead, read a few books in English, and soon you will feel that "I have seen Paul yesterday" is wrong, and "I saw Paul yesterday" is correct. The first sentence will simply sound wrong. How? Simple. Your brain has seen the second kind of sentence 192 times, and the first kind 0 times.

Do you know what is the difference between a learner and a native speaker? The native speaker "feels" what is correct. He can tell that a sentence sounds either good or bad (unnatural) and he doesn't need to use grammar rules for that. He can do it because he has heard and read lots of English sentences in his life. This is the only difference between a learner and a native speaker — the amount of input. You can be like a native speaker if you get lots of input, too.

How I realized I was a native speaker
I'll never forget the first time that I opened Michael Swan's Practical English Usage (an excellent English grammar/usage reference book). It was at the end of high school and I was already very good at English. The book was full of English grammar and usage problems like "when should you use below and when under?" and "what sort of things can you express with the word must?". For each problem, there were example sentences (showing the correct and incorrect way to say something) and rules such as "Use under when something is covered or hidden by what is over it, and when things are touching".

I browsed through the book, looking at page after page. When looking at an incorrect example, I'd think "Of course that's wrong; it sounds awful". When looking at a rule, I'd think "Oh, I didn't know there was a rule for that". Page after page, I had the impression that I didn't know any of the rules in the book, and... I didn't need them! (And I couldn't learn all of them even if I wanted to.) I could just look at a sentence and tell if it sounded good or not.

I was like a native speaker of English. By reading books, watching TV, listening to recordings, etc. I had gotten lots of input and developed an intuition for English.

There are many examples of people who have become close to native speakers because of intensive input — for example, Michal, me, and the other authors in the Successful English learners section. You can also read about two interesting cases from a scientific article by Stephen Krashen.