Hello, welcome back to Key Strategies for Mastering English as a second language.
I'm so happy to have you back for session one today.
We're really going to dig into how you learn this is really exciting and it's so helpful.
But it's something that we don't usually learn in school, something that we don't think about very
often.
How often do you think about how you learned to speak, to read?
To walk.
We don't think about that very often, we just do them the things that we do every.
Do you remember or actively think about how you learned to drive or do anything or brush your teeth?
We don't think about those things, but if we think about how we learned to speak our first language,
we can make it easier because we have a tendency to make learning another language so much harder than
it needs to be.
So let's go way back in time.
Make it really simple.
How did we learn our first language?
How did you learn your first language, whatever your mother tongue is?
You developed your sense of hearing before you were born.
And you started listening, listening to the sounds and the rhythms of your language.
And then after you were born, you really focused on conversation, listening to people tell you how
cute you were, people tell you, please stop crying.
Arguments, conversation about business, interacting with people at the grocery store, you heard all
sorts of super useful conversations and you listened to them and you learned from them for months,
sometimes nine months to a year.
Before you actually started to participate by speaking.
And when you did that, what did you do?
You didn't immediately say, please, may I have a book so I can learn the grammar so I don't make any
mistake?
Who does that, no one.
You don't even know what a book is.
What did you what did you ask for?
You asked for people to listen to you making sounds, pay attention, I'm going to make a sound and
and I kicked.
And then you start to see words and then phrases, and after a while you start to speak complete sentences
and everybody starts to tell you, you said it wrong and they start to correct you.
Have you ever corrected a small child and what they said?
Do they become discouraged?
Not usually, not unless you mean.
Excited, oh, yeah, now I know how to ask for that ice cream properly, and next time you'll probably
give it to me.
Let me learn that.
Tell me more.
When I was maybe five or six, I distinctly remember being in the car with my aunt, who was an English
literature professor teacher, and I was telling her story.
Me and mom went to the store and she just very kindly said, Mom and I.
And that little man at the end meant you can continue since you've corrected your sentence, that was
all.
I loved it.
How do we.
Usually we feel such a failure.
I forgot again, I can't I remember that.
But if we change our perspective a little bit and we start to see it as exciting, I yes, now I know
how to say it.
People will understand me and frankly, I can get what I want.
Maybe.
Do we listen more than we speak?
Most of us don't.
Do we listen and speak more than we?
Read, write or practice grammar.
Not usually when we're learning another language, but those skills, reading, writing and learning,
grammar and those skills came much later.
They came after listening and speaking for some of us, they didn't come until.
School.
So.
Really?
We have it backwards when we're learning a foreign language for you, English.
We have it backwards, we start setting all conversations first.
Instead of sounds.
We spend so much time memorizing grammar rules.
Instead of practicing our speech.
Instead of listening.
Grammar is important, don't get me wrong.
We'll talk about it more later in another session.
But it's not how we learned first.
When we were born, we weren't given a book of grammar until you memorize it.
But that's what we do to ourselves when we learn foreign language as adults.
Or as older children.
So remembering, listening and then speaking lots and lots of listening and speaking and then reading,
writing and grammar.
We remember that pattern.
It can help us to streamline our process of learning English.
It can help us to make it easier to make it more natural.
And then we can make it more fun because isn't listening to music way more fun than doing grammar exercises?
I think so.
I don't like grammar exercises, even though they're useful and they help.
They're not as much fun.
They don't learn as quickly.
So we have the pattern.
What else do we need to know about how we learn?
What about the way in which we take in information?
There are so many different ways we learn by seeing, by hearing, by touching, by smelling, by doing
with our hands and our mouths speaking.
We learned a lot of different ways.
What kind of learner are you, what do you prefer?
Most people, in my experience, prefer to learn either visually by what they see or their auditory
learners.
They prefer to listen.
And they learned really quickly they have memorized those lyrics to the songs.
Other people like my mom, she needs to see it.
Don't tell me directions, show me a map.
Don't give me a long list of words, draw me a picture.
That's how she learns best.
An auditory learner, they learn best by really listening, I have a student who he.
Said he didn't know how he learned his native language because he could read and read and read and read,
read something 12 times over immediately, go take the test and fail.
But he can read his native language, which is Arabic, and in most cases they don't use the marks that
indicate the vowel sounds in between the consonants.
But he knows how to read it.
He knows how to pronounce those words correctly.
He said, how did that happen?
Happened because he's an auditory learner.
Anything you tell him, he memorizes, he remembers.
And so he memorized the sounds and when he eventually learned this picture, because with that sound,
he remembered the sounds that weren't there in the picture.
Because he had that auditory file to fall back on.
So, like I said, we learn from every sense we learn in so many different ways and it's best if we
combine as many of them as possible.
For example, if I'm attending a conference or something, I, I not only listen, I need to listen.
I look at the speaker and I take a lot of notes, a lot of notes.
And sometimes I actually will, like, mouth my notes to myself like that so that I hear a little something.
I also hear a little something extra.
And I'm saying it.
So we learn in lots of different ways we do best when we combine them.
I am primarily a visual learner, so the notes help me.
They helped me to pay attention.
They help me to visualize and create pictures in my mind of what's being said, if a picture is being
shown that I stopped taking notes and really examine the picture.
If you are an auditory learner.
Maybe you.
When you're reading a book, stop torturing yourself, they just reading, reading, reading.
Spend some time also listening, have the audio book playing while you read, use both together, make
sure to include listening in as many of your learning activities as you can.
If there isn't an audio file, I'll read it out loud so that you hear yourself saying it.
It will help you to speed up the process because you're taking advantage of your strengths and the more
ways you try to learn something.
The stronger those connections are in your brain.
So take full advantage of that.
When we.
Really think about how we learn.
It helps us.
To be able to create a pattern and to select materials.
And methods of learning that will enable us that will help us to get the most out of whatever material
we're using.
Whatever time we have.
A person could spend 30 minutes reading the book, but if they're an auditory learner.
They won't get as much out of it as if they spent 10 minutes listening and reading.
Make the most of your time, make the most of your strengths.
Utilize every ability that you have.
And make it count.
It's really going to help you to overcome some of those obstacles, to make it easier to make it a more
natural process.
To follow that pattern, listening and speaking, those are some important.
Something else that's really important is making sure that we choose the right materials.
There are so many materials we can choose from when learning English.
But some of them have nothing to do with anything we'll ever use.
If you're an artist and you want to be able to speak about the emotions behind your art.
To inspire people.
To.
Want to hire you, to commission you to create art for them.
Would it really benefit you?
To learn the dialogue from the medical drama on Netflix.
Probably not so much.
So we need to learn to focus our focus.
So that we can get the most out of the materials we use, even if they involve listening and speaking
and our primary learning style in the next session, we're going to go deep into that and we're going
to find out where we need to focus our energies so that we can get the most out of our learning experience.
I really thank you so much for joining me for today's session.
Don't forget to go to our workbook and complete that section for session to unlearn how you learn.
So in that section takes some time to really think about how you learned your native language, what
a learning style suits you the most.
Take some notes.
Think about what's in it for you and how can you use that information to improve the way that you learn
English.
You know what?
You can use this.
You can apply this to everything that you learn to make it easier, to make it faster, to make it so
that you learn more effectively.
I hope that it really helps you.
I really appreciate you being here with me for this course.
Thank you so much.
I look forward to seeing you in our next session.
Focus your focus.
See you then.