I remember when I was still working as an English tutor, I once wrote a blog post about how to encourage children to learn the language. At the time, I thought I was so smart because I came up with this simple trick. Curiosity! Of course, if a child is curious about the world, they’ll go looking for information. And if not enough of it is available in their native tongue, surely that’ll encourage them to look up the topic in English. Right? Wrong!
As a young teacher ten years ago, I severely underestimated the lack of curiosity in humankind as a whole. In my particular case, the kids couldn’t even be bothered to watch their favourite cartoons in English.
“Why should we do it? There’s a dubbed version. It’s easier that way!”
A lot of the time, the child’s inability to grasp the language had little to do with their actual skills. And it had everything to do with discipline.
There’s a common misconception in my country that in order to learn a foreign language you need to have a special gift. I’ve always asked how the children born in their respective countries have no trouble learning their mother tongue, as long as they have their responsible adults talking to them.
To a certain point, it’s very easy to teach a child. It’s much trickier with adults, because they start to question you. They rely too much on what they already know.
If I were to tell a student to read a fragment of text or look at some new vocabulary, they would ask if it’s the right ‘level’ for them. They wanted a different textbook and more exercises. I specifically catered to ‘fluent speaking’, yet I had trouble explaining to my students why, to learn how to speak, they need to speak. But all they wanted to do was multiple-choice questions or ‘fill in the gaps’.
I remember once a student questioning my ‘methodology’ and asking if maybe he needed a different textbook. At that time, we had been working for weeks. I reminded him that our very first lesson, I started with giving him a list of resources, news websites and the like, that would be easy for him to comprehend. I asked if he had looked at those resources even once. The silence was deafening.
I’ve been trying to learn another foreign language for quite a few years, and without the help of any tutors. I’ve noticed that my greatest struggle is to find resources not aimed at students.
Once you can submerge yourself in the proper language environment, you can properly start learning. Yet, it’s very hard to do so if you don’t have enough words to know what to look for yet.
I think that what really helped me grasp the English language was my constant consumption of information. Music in the background, news reports 24/7, and just constant browsing through the internet.
Do you remember the stumbleupon website? It was excellent for finding random resources. I could spend hours there browsing and reading all sorts of stuff.
If we talk about language learning and fluency, it’s all about how big your active vocabulary is. It’s not enough to know all the words. The trick is to remember them when you need to say something.
Memorising lists isn’t enough. A vast vocabulary can only be built through curiosity.
I think this concept can be applied to many areas of our lives. To me personally, it resonates the loudest in language learning and writing. But that’s probably a topic for another blog post.
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