John’s EFL Cafe

Hello everyone !! It has been too long since i posted an entry here. I recently received a very sincere comment from a reader of this blog. Here is what they said

“Hi, John,
I keep practising listening everyday whenever I go home on the road. But I become a little confused now because most of my materials are Radio, like BBC/VOA which are all about political news. I found these political news might not be suitable to listen because even though I can understand those, sometimes, I still can’t understand the oral English in the normal life, in other words, my listening and speaking proficiency are still not be improved. So, I was wondering whether I shouldn’t listen those Radio again? Is it better to choose another more suitable listening materials? If you think so, what kind of materials should I choose?”

I am sharing this comment because it is typical of the kind of question i have been asked by students over the years. I have already addressed [written about] this topic to some extent in my blog entry and the one that followed that.

Today I would like to continue writing on this topic by introducing the concept of ‘context’. You can get a deeper understanding of the meaning of the word ‘context’ here.

Context is necessary for learning because it is how our brains attach meaning to new information. When we listen to V.O.A. [Voice of America] or B.B.C. [{the}British Broadcasting Corporation] we are listening to a news channel meant primarily [mainly] for native English speakers who are living outside their own country and who wish to keep up with news in their own countries. I know that there are special programs for language learners but, those aside, V.O.A. and B.BC. are NOT good sources for students of English unless they have a fairly good level of listening comprehension to begin with. The reason they are not good learning sources is that the content of the stories you will hear [the context] is information that you as a language learner are not familiar with. You do not know the political leaders of these countries nor most other countries outside of China for that matter. You are not aware of world events. You do not understand either the economic systems of these countries nor the affairs being discussed. As a result of your lack of knowledge about these issues [politics, economics, trade relations, election issues, etc.] you could not possibly understand what is being spoken about, even if your English language listening comprehension is good.

I am fully aware that it has been conventional wisdom [advice] from English teachers within the Chinese school system for you to listen to these sources as a way of improving your listening [comprehension]. . I believe this comes from an era [time] when it made sense to suggest a ‘free’ source of ‘real’ native English and when radios were a cheap and convenient way to access that source of authentic English. At the same time, we are all aware that in today’s world students of all levels are overloaded with work and for those of you who are now working, you are far too busy to have the time that this approach would require to yield [give you] decent results in terms of your skill level improvement . In a word, it is a far too inefficient [time consuming] method to use for the purpose of improving your listening comprehension.

My standard approach to answering this question is to begin by going back to your language learning foundation [in English] and to acknowledge that most of you can read English reasonably well [at lease in the word-after-word sense] . So, if you have a reasonable word recognition level when reading English, it stands to reason that if you listen to words you know as you read them, your brain/mind will associate [connect] the familiar written word with the sound of the word. Once your brain has an adequate supply of these remembered ‘sound words’ - meaning words it recognizes just based on their sound, you will recognize and understand the meaning of those words when you hear them. So, as a language learners, your goal should be to increase the number of words your brain can recognize by hearing their sound alone [not by seeing them] .

What I am getting at is that -to answer the question of the reader who left the comment posted at the beginning of this blog entry - the best material you can use to help you develop better listening comprehension [understanding what is being heard] , is material you can already read and understand and then, by listening to it, you can learn to jump from reading comprehension to listening comprehension. The fact that you have become familiar with the material through reading means that you already know the ‘context’ of that material. Hence, your main focus in listening to it is to learn to bridge from reading comprehension to listening comprehension. When you listen to B.B.C. or V.O.A. your lack of knowledge of the background ‘context’ of the stories gets in the way of your learning process.

More about topic this next time. In the mean time, this is John, doing my best to make sense of English for YOU.

I feel it is important for me to mention again something that I often mention when people ask me how to improve their English. One of the keys to understanding English more easily is to know that native English speakers [like myself] very, very seldom use the same key word or term over and over again, either in speech or in writing. Instead, after using any key word once, we replace it with its ‘synonyms’. [Synonyms are words or phrases with either the same or a very similar meaning as the original word.] Here is an example of what I mean: The word ‘cordial’ is a formal and polite word with many synonyms such as: gracious; affable; agreeable; good natured; good tempered; pleasant; sociable and warm. So, in order to illustrate my point about avoiding repetition [repeating the same word more than once] I’ll make some sentences which replace the word ‘cordial’ with other words [synonyms] that have the same general meaning as the word ‘cordial’ instead of using the word ‘cordial over and over again. ‘Sophia is extremely well liked because people find her very cordial in all her dealings. In fact, it is her graciousness that people most often think about when this good-natured woman is mentioned in conversation. If everyone were as agreeable to be around as Sophia is, our meetings would always be more pleasant to attend. Wouldn’t it be great it everyone was as sociable and warm as she is!’ In this example you can see, by looking at the underlined words how the key concept of ‘cordiality’ is mentioned ‘in spirit’ over and over again without ever repeating the word ‘cordial’. I hope that this example [above] will help you see why learning synonyms of the words you are learning along with the word itself, is of great value to you in your process of learning to master English. This ‘habit’; once developed, will help you improve your listening comprehension, your reading comprehension and your spoken English!!!!!!!!!

I have had a few comments left by students who have read my blog entries. Thank you. You know it takes time and thought to produce these entries and by leaving a response YOU let me know that my effort to help you has not been in vain [wasted time].

A very sincere and frustrated student who i believe is very typical of most of you reading these blog entries posted a comment to my last entry and i typed an answer for her under comments. I would like to enter it here for all of you to read since i believe all of you can benefit from reading it.By the way, if you won’t bother to read these entries, please don’t ask me how to improve your English when you see me. If you HAVE read these entries and still have questions THEN it is great. The point is i want to help people who are willing to help themselves. Not those looking for quick and easy answers. Guess what, there are none !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Here is the comment i mentioned above:

1. johnslinn Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 8:35 am   editDear Tulika, thank you for your comment. You are like many other people I have taught over the years since I first came to China. In fact, it is people like you who have motivated me to create this blog in the first place. Do not be discouraged by your current results with your English. Keep reading this blog and think carefully about each entry I post and your English WILL improve. In fact, read each entry several times if you can. Your conscious mind can only grasp a small amount of what you are ‘taking in’ at any moment through your eyes, ears and other senses. Re-reading the entries here will allow you to understand at a deeper and deeper level - each and every time you re-read them. To help you improve your reading skills, pay attention not only to the ‘meaning’ of what I write but look at the ’structure’ - the way the words are put together to form phrases and sentences. I usually rewrite each blog entry four or five times. I write it and then I read it. As I read it I look for ways to make it clearer and better. I keep doing this with each blog entry until I feel it is helpful for the reader - you. Editing in this way by going over and over what I have written helps me to arrive at a better ‘end product’ which is what you read.

   Unfortunately the school system indirectly trained you NOT to do this with your own ‘work’ because you were so loaded down with so much homework that you did everything as quickly as possible so that you could move on to the next piece of homework. The result was that you developed a habit of doing things quickly and ‘moving on’ to the next thing without ever going back to edit or correct anything you had done.

   Do yourself a favor, from now on, decide to s-l-o-w  d-o-w-n and enjoy learning from one ‘thing’ by going over and over it - each time looking for MORE from the same thing, be it a movie, a song or an article you are reading.

   I often tell students like you that it is much better for your language skill development to watch one [1] English language movie five [5] times than it is to watch five [5] movies one [1] time each. The reason is; as i have been telling you, that EACH time you re-watch the movie [or re-listen to an English song, or re-read a passage] your brain/mind will get MORE FROM THE SAME THING. Of course part of you wants to see the ‘5′ different movies instead of re-watching one five times. That’s great for ‘fun’. But for purposes of learning, repetition [doing something over and over again] will bring you many more benefits. I promise this is true!!!!!!!!!!!!

   By the way, when watching western movies, choose some with language that is not too quick and have the English subtitles on so your eyes will see the words as your ears hear them. This helps your brain connect the written word with it’s sound. Very useful!!!! [fast ACTION movies are not a great choice]

   There is a site you may like to visit that may also give you some help. But please, before you click on this link and go there, STOP, Close Your Eyes For A Moment and Let your brain ‘digest’ what you just read.
   ————————————————————————————–
   Here is the link i just mentioned: http://www.englishclub.com/listening/everywhere.htm

Dear friends, in my last blog entry I wrote about developing the skill of ‘hearing’ or ‘reading’ phrases at a time rather than concentrating on each-individual-word [one-at-a-time] as it enters either your ears or your eyes. I also ended that post by mentioning a principle which has to do with how our brain/mind naturally works. You see, our brains are very efficient and they are designed to SERVE US. They do this[serve us], in part, by recognizing when something is important, useful or interesting to ‘us’ and converting it from a ‘conscious’ effort [something that requires our undivided attention] into a subconscious habit.

Let me give you an example of how this process really works so that you will better understand what i mean. I believe that all of you reading this blog can tie your own shoe laces. [if not, please come and see me for help !]

When you were a ‘xiao peng you’ and tried to tie your shoes for the first time, it represented a HUGE challenge. In fact,it was nearly impossible. The reason it was nearly impossible was because it required a complex process of learning and combining [putting together at the same time] several skills. [please note that this is equally true of learning language skills as well].

So, in order to tie your own shoelaces, your little fingers had to learn to do the following: hold the laces; cross one over the other; pull them tight; loop each lace [form a circle shape with it] ; wrap one loop over the other; tuck it under; pull it tight…. my goodness!!! how did you ever learn to do it!

I’ll tell you how. You were MOTIVATED - you had a reason or a desire to do it successfully. You realized your mother/father/grandmother/etc. could not be there to do this task everytime you needed it done. That understanding motivated you to keep trying and trying; over and over again as your little finger muscles learned how to create a successful result. You persisted [kept trying] as you slowly got better and better and one day, you succeeded !!!

Now, here is the best part!!!!. After you consciously [with great intention] repeated this process of tieing your shoe laces over and over enough times, your brain [your subconscious mind, to be exact] made a decision that, because of your continued effort and intention given to accomplishing the ‘task’[which in this example is tieing your shoe laces] it must be important to you; your brains owner. Once your subconscious mind made this decision, the task[tieing your shoe laces] was ‘magically’ converted from a ‘conscious effort’ in to a ’subconscious habit’ that no longer required your ‘conscious’ attention. ‘You’ could ‘consciously‘ do something else like talk to a family member or think about your friends while ‘your shoe laces were being tied’.

But, ‘who’ tied them? The ‘you’ who you think of AS you was busy thinking or talking. Yet, the shoe laces got tied!!!! AND they were tied well!

Was it Magic? The answer is .. Yes and no.

NO because it is just how our brain/mind is naturally designed to work, but YES because this amazing process goes on over and over in our lives as our subconscious mind repeatedly converts ‘conscious’ activity into ’sub-conscious habit’ - every time we learn something that is either important, useful or interesting to us.

The exact same process happened when you learned to use a computer keyboard and it works when you learn to drive a car.

So, what does THIS have to do with improving your English?

EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As I see it, a good part of my helpfulness to you is in my ability to draw your attention to things that will help you put your brain/mind to work in the it’s most efficient way when it comes to language learning. The root cause of a lot of your ‘weaknesses’ or ‘difficulties’ rests in the fact that you never learned HOW TO LEARN language properly in the first place. What is very sad about that is that it is much harder to ‘unlearn’ a poor habit’ and replace it by a ‘positive habit’ than it is to learn the proper way in the first place.

So, if you will trust me as a person who has devoted more than 9 years to successfully helping hundreds of Chinese people learn to improve their English, I believe I can continue to introduce ideas and concepts that will have you making progress toward better and better English. At the same time YOU must realize that no one else can put in the time or devote the attention to the task of improving for you. If you want YOUR BRAIN to understand and produce better English, then YOU must pay the price.

The price; as I hope you have learned from reading this blog entry, is for you to devote a relatively short period of time and attention to ‘consciously’ eliminating the negative habits you have now and replacing them with positive new skills in order to improve your English.

Only YOU have the authority to give YOUR subconscious mind the message that something is important, useful or interesting enought for it to convert it from a ‘conscious effort’ into a ’subconscious habit’ . There are NO shortcuts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Will you trust me to help you?

This is John, doing my best to help make sense of English for you !

In my last blog entry I wrote about the issue of improving your listening comprehension. At the end of that post I wrote:

‘In the coming posts to this blog I will attempt to address this issue of what habits are getting in your way now and what new skills can be learned to make it easier for you to improve your listening comprehension.’

I also mentioned that the ‘key’ to changing your skill levels involve:   a] changing old [negative] habits - meaning habits that get in the way of your progress.

and   b] learning some new skills[which can soon become new  habits].

The first negative habit I’d like to address is the habit of listening to - ‘one’ - ’word’- ‘at’- ‘a’- ‘time’. You can see how choppy that makes the phrase  ’one word at a time’.  This /one/word/at/a/time/habit  also makes it extremely hard to understand what it means.  

The first requirement for any kind of learning is for the learner to ‘understand’ or ‘make sense of ‘ what they are supposed to be learning.

How can we replace this negative habit of listening for, or reading, only  ’one word at a time’  you ask? The new habit or skill you need to develop is to learn to hear ‘phrases’. Phrases are groups of words whose meaning comes from the combination of the words when used together. Even if you know the meaning of each individual [separate] word in a phrase such as  ’at the bus stop’. [at; the; bus and ’stop’], you will NOT understand the meaning of the phrase ’at the bus stop’. It is only when your brain can ‘decode’ this phrase as meaning ‘a place where busses stop’ that you can understand what is being said [or written]  AND what it really means.

How can you learn to recognize groups of words as ‘phrases‘? A really good place to begin learning this skill is by using English songs. It is worth mentioning here that a ’song’ is just a ‘poem‘ [a form of written or spoken language used for story telling] which has been put to music. The musical rhythm of the song can actually help  us learn to ‘hear’ or ‘identify’ the phrases more clearly.

Let’s use an example of a song that I have used quite successfully in my oral English classes during my 7 years as an English teacher in Chinese universities. It is called ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and is sung by Celine Dion.

It begins- 

‘Every night in my dreams I see you I feel you.’

Put into phrases we get -

/every night/ in my dreams/ i see you/ I feel you/  

The first phrase-  ’every night’ - tells us WHEN something happens.

The second phrase- ‘in my dreams’ -tells us WHERE it happens

The third phrase -’I see you’ and the fourth’-I feel you’ tell us WHAT happens.

So, the words are converted into meaning as our brain converts the phrases into a ’story’ about somebody . We could retell this by saying- ‘The lady in the story dreams about someone every night and her dreams are so vivid she actually sees the person and feels their presence.’  

Another good song for the purpose of learning to hear whole phrases when we listen to or read English is the song-

‘Right Here Waiting For You’ by Richard Marx

It begins -‘Oceans apart day after day and I slowly go insane.’     ’I hear your voice on the line but it doesn’t stop the pain.’

The phrase are: /oceans apart[where]/ day after day[when]/ and I slowly[how]/ go insane[what]/.

I hear your voice[what]/ on the line[where]/ but it doesn’t[how]/ stop the pain[what]/

Get the idea?

If you have some slow English songs like these two at home, listen to them for a while as you read their words and break the sentences [or lines as they are called in a song] into phrases. I have the lyrics[words] enlarged onto A4 paper for easy reference. These can be found at www.absolutelyrics.com

Practice ‘hearing’ the separate phrases as ‘groups of words’  rather than breaking the sentences into /individual /separate/ words/ as you have been doing- by habit.

If you do this for a short time with ‘conscious attention’ and ‘the desire to improve your skills’  I KNOW that this will help you eliminate your old negative habit and replace it with a new positive skill. Let me know how you are progressing.  

This is John - trying to make sense out of English for YOU.

All of you reading this have been told many times that there are four language skill areas. I’ll call them skill groups since each of the four have several ’sub’ skills to be masterd. In my experience teaching in universities in China I heard students reiterate this many times. [For the meaning of re-it-er-ate please visit http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/reiterate ]

I found that there was some confusion in the minds of almost all students about how to improve these skills. In this post I will begin to address the major skill ‘listening’ .

Have you ever been asked to improve your ‘listening’? It’s IMPOSSIBLE !!!! ‘Blasphame’ you say ! [ http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/blaspheme ] Not at all. You can not imrove your listening. What you CAN improve is your ‘listening comprehension’. [ http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/comprehension ] Comprehension; if you have followed the link to the definition I just gave you, means to be able to understand, and here the idea is: improving your listening comprehension means being able to understand MORE of what you are listening to. THAT is desireable as well as acheivable!!!!!

In the course of teaching at Da Wai here in Dalian I had the good fortune of teaching two adult classes at the universities adult college. One of these classes had several former teachers who were upgrading their skills and education. Amoung this delightful group there was a woman with whom I spoke at length on this subject after giving a class on the topic some weeks before. She had applied my suggestions for improving her ‘listening comprehension’ and she told me my suggestions worked very well. She also told me that the ‘conventional wisdom’ she had received from her [Chinese] English teacher when she asked HER how to improve this skill was ‘Listen longer’ meaning spend more time listening.

Now I ask you; if you can’t DO something well and you ‘do more of it’ without CHANGING anything, HOW in the world will it improve? Answer. You won’t.

In order to improve anything we must do one of the following: a] change some habit b] learn some new skills c] be hit by lightning and suddenly be a genious at English [just kidding!].

In the coming posts to this blog I will attempt to address this issue of what habits are getting in your way now and what new skills can be learned to make it easier for you to imrove your listening comprehension.

Another critical difference between Chinese and English is the fact that Chinese language does not use verb ‘tenses’ the way we do in English. [When you read the word ‘tense’ think about ‘relationship to time’.] I was puzzled by this until I discussed it with a Chinese friend and then I came to understand. In Chinese the ‘time’ related word [such as today; yesterday; this afternoon; in two days and so on] are placed BEFORE [in front of] the verb. As a result the listener or reader already knows what the time frame is BEFORE hearing or reading the verb. Hence, the absence of ‘tense’ for the verbs. Perhaps if I could go back in time I would change English syntax [the arrangement of the words and phrases within a sentence] and have it become the same as Chinese. Unfortunately I don’t have these magical powers[yet]!As a reminder of something you learned some time ago and probably don’t give a lot of thought to today have a look at http://www.englishclub.com/esl-lesson-plans/worksheet-grammar-future.htm .  What is required is for you to consciously practice THINKING  about the sense of time BEFORE you either write or speak in English. If you do this with ‘intention’ [the desire to improve] this habit will become automatic [controlled by your subconscious] in no time at all and you will find yourself producing much better quality English. Give it a dedicated effort and let me know how it works.

This is John, trying to make sense out of English in order to help you improve. 

NOTE: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN AND READ THE POSTS [ENTRIES] FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE AND THEN UP since they appear in reverse order to their creation. In other words the first entries are last if you start reading at the top [here].

This post should have been placed here yesterday but I got a bad cold so I decided to keep my germs to myself and rest up for today[ Tuesday]. I still have my cold but we are better friends today - meaning we are cooperating in my life more.

I am hopeful [perhaps dellusionally] that many of you students are reading this bolg; at least during moments of boredom as a means of lifting your spirits and beginning to see the possible.

Let’s face it, language learning can be a grind. A long agonizing process of instilling new skills that were once learnt as a child and now weary your adult mind. I can sympathize. At the same time I know beyond doubt that your attitude about anything in your life is deeply influences your ability to learn as well as your willingness to learn does. Most people’s brains are tuned to the ‘radio station’ W.I.I.F.M’ . What you say ? That means What’s In It For Me . I understand that. So let’s put the two ideas together. Your attitude affects your ability to learn and your mind is focused on what benefits [W.I.I.F.M.] there are for you to learn English.

Well, here’s the thing. Only you can answer that question. I will do my best in the coming training sessions to make sure the materials are interesting, useful and focused on important topics. But, that being said, it’s up to you to shift your brain into English learning mode.

The English language team is in the process of organizing topics and materials for the next section of English classes. We would love to hear from you via e-mail or through your posts on this blog. Tell me [John] what types of subjects and or activities you prefer to take part in as a language learning process.

KEY POINT: the first thing most of you need to do in order to improve your English language skills is to stop translating English words you ‘don’t know’ into Chinese.     Why, you say ?     Because as soon as you translate something from English into Chinese you are THINKING and remembering in Chinese. And when you are thinking in Chinese you don’t understand or remember the meaning/concept/idea in English. By translating every word you think you don’t know into Chinese you have just gone back to what was familiar, which is your mother tongue,Chinese. The problem with this strategy is that EVERY TIME you come to that same word or idea AGAIN you will have to translate it AGAIN because you never learnt it in English the last time.

Stay tuned for more ideas that will help you improve your English. This is John, doing my best to make sense of English- for YOU.

Here is a link to the word mainstream using one of my favorite web based resources for both students and myself.

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/mainstream

Use this entry as an example and ’save’ the link for future use when you need to look up a word. You can also use  http://education.yahoo.com/reference/ for dictionary, encyclopedia, worldfactbook and other very useful reference sources. Let me know how you make out using it.  John 

It would seem from the quiz results I’ve edited so far that the word mainstream was not well understood. To solve this problem we can go to a good dictionary like the LONGMAN DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH [English-Chinese] and look the word up. I know you love the online dictionaries that allow you to translate from English to Chinese but……. they don’t really help you learn English…… do they.

So, let’s have a look at the work mainstream [the+S] meaning: the main or most widely accepted way of thinking or acting in relation to a subject [my emphasis for your benefit]. Here is an example of the word in the context of a sentence. ‘Their view lies outside the mainstream of current medical thinking.’ Notice that something [ Their views] are compared to the mainstream [views] by using the words ‘outside of ‘ . And then we have a subject which is current medical views in our example. The word can also be used as an adjective [ remember, adjectives describe or modify nouns] . An example of this usage is ‘ Xyz is part of mainstream phiosophical thinking.’ [Xyz is just used for the example and has no meaning]

I hope this post will help all of you better understand the word mainstream and ; as a result, be able to use it properly. John