Of all the students I’ve worked with, one group always seems to do better than the rest even though they all do the same thing. Sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it – but it’s true. Make sure you’re in the right group.

There’s an echo here

There’s an echo here at Successful English, and it sounds something like this: when we receive comprehensible input, our brains acquire, or pick up, new language. That’s the secret for success with English, or any other language. The more understandable English you read or listen to, the more your English will improve.

Anyone can do what needs to be done to improve their English. You can do it on your own. Without a teacher. And you can do it for the rest of your life.

Doing the right thing without success

Why is it, then, that one student can receive comprehensible English and get better while another doesn’t? Is it possible to do the right thing and still fail? Language research says “yes.”

Our brains have a wonderful ability to process what we read or hear and to acquire, or pick up, new language. It’s automatic. And we aren’t usually aware of it when it happens or even after it happens. It is possible, however, to interrupt or even stop the process. The problem is what we call the affective filter.

Language research tells us there are three things that can keep understandable input from being processed by your brain. If you’re anxious, if you have low self-esteem, or if you don’t consider yourself to be a potential member of the group that speaks a language, the filter is turned on. And when it’s on, the filter interrupts the flow of usable language to your brain. You can do the right thing and still not benefit from it.

What can I do about it?

There are several steps you can take to ensure that nothing interrupts your language acquisition process:

The first is to change the way you think about yourself and the process of acquiring more English. I’ve written several articles – What comes first?,  Don’t worry, be happy, An English lesson from a tennis coach, and It’s not broken! – that will help you.

The second is to make good choices of things to read and listen to. A number of years ago, an American professor from the University of Chicago introduced a helpful idea – he called it flow. Flow is a mental condition in which you are completely involved in what you are doing. It’s related to what I wrote about in A word every language learner should know. Choose things to read or listen to – fiction or non-fiction – that will take you away from where you are and what you’ve been doing, that will allow you to escape your everyday world and experience flow.

Finally, read and listen for yourself and your own enjoyment. Don’t turn reading and listening for better English into a job. Trust the natural mental process you were born with. Let your brain do what it was designed to do and don’t get in its way.

Final thoughts

In my experience, the most successful English students have been those who take a playful approach to reading and listening for better English. They are almost childlike in their ability to enjoy what they’re doing, to explore and satisfy their curiosity. Why don’t you join them?

Warren Ediger

References: Flow (psychology) Wikipedia; Krashen (2003) Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use; Cskiszentmihalyi (1997) Finding Flow.

Many English learners would like to “sound like a native English speaker.” What about that? Is it necessary? Or is it a good idea to even try? What can, or should, an English learner try to do about accent?

Language and accent

Sociologists tell us that language does two things for us. First and most importantly, it makes communication possible. Accent contributes to good communication, but it’s a surprisingly small part. If you visit the U.S., you’ll hear many accents. We are, after all, a country of immigrants. Many politicians, entertainers, news announcers, and everyday Americans have noticeable accents. But they communicate very well. We often don’t even think about it when we hear an accent.

The second thing language does is identify you as a member of a social group. Your language may identify what part of the country you come from – people from Boston sound much different than people from Dallas. It may identify your profession or level of education – people with more education often use different vocabulary than people with less education. It may identify what country you came from – Mexican-Americans sound different than Asian-Americans. Accent is part of your identification, but again, only a part. Vocabulary and other language elements also help identify the group you belong to.

What to do

What should you do about your accent if you’re a language learner? First become a good communicator. Read and listen. Get as much comprehensible input – understandable English – as you can. This is the most effective and efficient way to build your overall fluency, or language ability.

If you want to modify your accent, be realistic. You’ll always sound like you! You may be able to change your accent so you sound more like me. But you will never sound exactly like me. And that’s okay! That’s what we expect.

If you want to modify your accent, do it by listening to English that sounds the way you want to sound. Like other parts of language development, accent modification is mostly the result of the language you hear.

Modifying your accent

There are several things you can do to help modify your accent:

Identify with the language and the people who use it. Some describe this as seeing yourself as a “member of the club,” the group of people who share the language. Dr. Stephen Krashen says that “we acquire the accents of the group we feel we are members of or feel we can join. This explains why children do not talk exactly like their parents talk – they talk the way their friends talk.” In your mind, become a member of the English-users club.

“Empathy” can also be used to describe this kind of identification. Empathy is your ability to identify with another person or group of people, to understand and share their feelings. There is research evidence that high empathy leads to better accent. And some believe that reading and listening to fiction helps develop empathy. In other words, reading and listening to American fiction – pleasure reading – will help you develop a connection with the culture and the language and the people who use it.

Become fascinated with English. Fascination is like a magnet that pulls you in the direction you want to go. If you’re attracted to a language and the people who use it, if you really want to sound like one of them, your accent will change more than if you feel like you have to do it. Allow yourself to become fascinated with English. Don’t treat it like a subject to study. Enjoy it.

Practice “thoughtful listening.” When you listen thoughtfully, you hear more than words. You hear the music, or sound, of the language. You hear the melody – the up and down movement of a speaker’s voice. You hear the tempo – the way speakers speed up or slow down. You hear the rhythm – sounds that are emphasized and sounds that aren’t. You get the language sound in your mind and it becomes a part of you.

Thoughtful listening – being thoughtful about what you hear – requires listening with relaxed concentration. It’s enjoying and noticing, but not analyzing. Thoughtful listening doesn’t happen automatically. It may take time to develop. But the benefits will be worth it!

A final word

I recently asked an English learner why he wanted to speak like a native American. He told me that relationships were important in his work and that he was worried that his accent would make good relationships difficult. I can understand his desire for good relationships, but I don’t believe he needs to worry. Remember, you are more than your accent. If you’re the kind of person that others enjoy being around, you’ll enjoy good relationships even with your accent. We don’t care so much how you sound. But we do care what kind of person you are.

Warren Ediger

References: Krashen, A conjecture on accent in a second language (1997); Dealing with English fever (2003); Science Daily, What makes an accent in a foreign language lighter? Empathy and political identification with native speakers (2009).

After he read  Is my English getting better? Gabriel wrote: “I have a problem: I’m not sure of myself, I have afraid to talk to someone because I think I don’t have good pronunciation, or afraid to make mistakes about grammar rules… What can I do?” This is my answer.

We know that feelings and emotions play a powerful part, or role, in our ability to acquire new language. When we are relaxed, feel good about ourselves, see ourselves as real English-users, our ability to acquire English increases significantly. I have always believed that one of my greatest responsibilities as an ESL teacher is to help my students experience these feelings.

But what if our feelings are negative? What happens then? If we are anxious, if we don’t have confidence in ourselves, if we feel like we’ll never become a real English-user, we significantly limit, or reduce, our brain’s ability to process what we read and hear. We limit our ability to acquire English. Sometimes negative feelings also affect us when we try to use the English we have acquired.

A lesson from a tennis coach

Timothy Gallwey has written an interesting book called The Inner Game of Tennis. In this book he emphasizes the need to take advantage of natural learning processes, like the processes we used when we developed the ability to walk and speak our first language. He also emphasizes the importance of trusting the results of these processes.

According to Gallwey, who is a tennis player and coach, it’s very easy to “over teach” and take students’ attention away from the natural processes. It’s easy to fill their minds with so many instructions that they can’t relax and “play the game.” He says our students often improve the most when we say less, and when we give them the opportunity to watch, listen, and absorb. The same is true in language education: our students improve the most when we allow them to read, listen, and absorb.

This is important, Gallwey suggests, because there is a constant inner conversation going on in all of us. One part of us tries to focus “on the game.” While it tries to play tennis or speak English, the other part is always giving instructions – “do this, don’t do that” – and evaluating, or criticizing, what we’re trying to do. When the second voice is louder, and we begin to worry about how well we’re doing, we don’t play or speak as well as we could.

What can a student do?

I’d like to suggest two things that students can do to quiet the second, critical voice. First, when you are using English, focus your attention on the people you’re talking to and what you’re talking about, not on how well you’re doing. In other words, don’t listen to the critical voice.

When we focus on communication – sharing experiences and ideas with other people – the critical voice is quieter. I often saw examples of this in my adult ESL classroom. One group of students didn’t worry much about mistakes; they just wanted to talk! As a result, their English was usually better. The second group of students would have liked to talk, but they were so afraid of making mistakes – the critical voice was so loud – that they hesitated to say anything and, when they did, they often made more mistakes. In general, both groups had a similar level of English ability.

Second, accept your level of English ability, continue to feed the natural process of language development with interesting, understandable reading and listening, and believe that your English will get better. It’s okay to be a beginner and sound like one. It’s okay to be an intermediate and sound like one. In fact, if you’re an intermediate, it means that you’re not a beginner any more, and that’s great! Don’t worry about what you aren’t or what you can’t do yet. Accept where you are in the process, use the English you have, keep feeding the process, and celebrate the results as your English gets better.

Related articles:

• It’s not broken!
• Is my English getting better?
• The power of reading and listening

Warren Ediger

Grok.

I’ve always been amused by this odd-looking, odd-sounding little verb.

When I saw it again a few days ago, I suddenly thought, “This is something English learners need to do!” Are you grokking English? If not, you should be!

Before I get into that, though, let me tell you a little about grok.

The story of grok

Writer Robert Heinlein invented the word grok for his book Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). The book tells the story of a boy from Earth who was raised by Martians on Mars and later returned to Earth as a young man. In the book grok literally means to drink, but it’s also used as a metaphor. When it is, it has the idea of “becoming one with (something).”

Today you’ll find grok frequently used by geeks, or computer people. The Jargon File, which describes itself as a hacker’s dictionary, says that if you say you have grokked something, you have not simply learned it in a detached, or disconnected, way but in such a way that it becomes part of you, part of your identity. One of the results of grokking, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the experience of enjoyment.

Grokking for English learners

We learn a lot of things in a detached, or disconnected way. The periodic table in chemistry. The formula for the area of a circle. Facts about things or people. It’s the way those things are learned.

Unfortunately, many language learners try to learn a new language in the same way. It is not enough to memorize pieces of a language, such as grammar rules, vocabulary, etc. That’s learning a language in a detached way. Keeping it on the outside. Treating it as an alien.

If you want to say that you have grokked a language, you need to enter into the world of the language and let it become a part of you.

How to grok

Grokking is not difficult. Let me suggest two ways to get started:

First, read and listen to books, or other things, that are so interesting that you get deeply involved with them. So interesting that you can’t put them down. So interesting that you forget the time. When you do, you acquire more new language. Barriers that might stop, or slow down, the acquisition process disappear. It’s one of the best ways to make it easier for your brain to acquire more language.

Second, begin to think about yourself as a member of the English Literacy Club*, as a real English-user, even if you aren’t as fluent as you hope to be some day. Don’t think of English as something that is alien to you. Use your imagination. Think of yourself as an English insider, not an outsider. This can have a powerful positive effect on your ability to acquire more English and improve your fluency.

More and more of my students are grokking English. Yusmary is –  she says she’s becoming addicted to reading and feels like something is missing if she doesn’t have a good book to read. Bryan just started –  a few days ago, he told me he’s discovering that reading is the “most amazing and effective way” to improve his English and he’s beginning to feel like it’s his language. Adrian is – every time I talk to him, I hear about what he’s reading and how excited he is. More importantly, while I’m sharing their excitement, I’m hearing the difference in their English.

As the geeks say, “Grok in fullness!”

Warren Ediger

* This idea comes from Frank Smith in Joining the Literacy Club.

I recently received an e-mail from a student who apologized for his English and wrote, “…from this email you may know that I use ‘broken’ English.”

I have a different opinion!

While we are acquiring a new language, we develop an “in-between” language. Language teachers call this inter-language. Inter-language includes (1) what we know of the new language, (2) guesses about the new language, and (3) influences from our first language. Some of my Spanish-speaking students call their inter-language Spanglish!

Inter-language constantly changes while we are acquiring the new language. If an English language learner continues to read and listen to easy-to-understand English, their inter-language will become more and more like the English they want to speak and write.

The important thing about the e-mail I received from this student is that it was easy to understand. It was effective communication, even if it wasn’t perfect English.

Inter-language. It isn’t broken! It’s just different. It’s a sign that you are somewhere in between where you started and where you are going. And it will keep changing as you move closer and closer to your destination: fluent English.

Warren Ediger
warren [at] successfulenglish [dot] com