Speak a language fluently in 2021

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show and today’s the last lesson in our New Year’s Get Learning Languages five week course. And today we’re just going to talk about putting everything for lessons one through four together. So I wanted to talk about the four skills we really talk about in learning a language, right? We talk about, we need to learn listening and speaking, and those have reciprocity, and we also need to learn reading and writing, which have reciprocity. And we’ve talked about that in lessons earlier.

So generally speaking, these four skills have an order in which they develop. So we first listen and then we speak, we read, and then we write. And as a young language teacher, I was asked to equally assess these four different skills. And it was something I really struggled with because it didn’t completely make sense to me to separate these skills. So while those are four separate things, we often learn and practice them in a really integrated way. So consider in a simple conversation, you listen and then you speak, right? So those are two skills, those are integrated. And usually what’s said is dynamic, right? It’s based on what the other person has said.

And the order of our skill acquisition is pretty similar to how we learned our native language. We weren’t suddenly writing five page papers. We started with understanding first, and then we begin to learn how to read, which is learning what the words we say look like. We then learn how to write. And as you learn each skill, each enhances the other. So for example, as we learn how to read, we’re often at the same time, learning how to write. It’s not completely linear. You don’t completely learn how to read and then write, they have reciprocity. As we learn how to write, we start with copying and we’re learning how to read better. And we don’t learn the entire alphabet before learning the sounds letters make. All these things are sort of happening at the same time as you progress towards becoming a literate person, right? You learn to read and then you read to learn. And then all the language you understood became language you learned how to produce yourself. That became part of your language.

And we continue to learn how to read until we’re proficient enough to be able to read to learn. And when you can read, you can learn anything and you can do this on your own terms in your own time. ACTFL, The American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages has defined some different modes of communication that are much more appropriate to talk about the skills, the reading, writing, listening and speaking that we talked about. So there’s interpersonal, and this is communication between people. Presentational where one person is communicating. So think writing, writing an essay, writing a letter, speaking and interpretive, it’s where we’re understanding. And just as we talked about in our experience in what it’s like to learn our own language, we also see how these modes, these three modes together can accelerate your progress to help mimic your first learning language environment.

So I want to share some examples from real life that you can use in your language learning journey. Reading a book and being part of a book club where you talk about the book. I’m loving Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Reading a letter or a newspaper article, and writing a letter to the editor, watching the news or a film and talking about it with someone, right, going to the movies, or just simply having a conversation. So in language classes, a lot of times we do things called IPAs and those are Integrated Performance Assessments.