208 - How to Improve the Four Skills in English: Listening, Reading, Speaking & Writing

[Music] Hi everybody, my name is Shawna and this is the American English podcast. My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States. Through common expressions, pronunciation tips, and interesting cultural snippets or stories, I hope to keep this fun, useful, and interesting. Let's do it. [Music] You're a language learner, just like me. Over the years, I've spent a lot of time learning German, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and even Esperanto. My levels are very different in each of these languages, but each one has taught me something new. In today's episode, I want to go back to the fundamentals, how to improve the four skills, listening, reading, speaking, and writing. My perspective isn't coming only from being a learner though. It's also from teaching experience. After getting certified in T-SOL, I taught more than 3,000 ESL classes to students from around the world. And it always intrigued me why some students progress much faster than others. What are they doing differently? As both a teacher and a learner, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can learn languages more effectively. Maybe you have to. Cool. We're the same. The point is, I've sat with this question for a long time, and I hope some of the research and tips you hear today will help you reflect on your own learning process. Maybe even rethink the way you study, whether you work independently or with a teacher. Because learning how to learn is empowering that puts you in the driver's seat. And here's the key idea of today. Language skills improve faster when they overlap. When you listen or read and then speak or write about it, you're not just understanding English, you're training your brain to actually use it. Now that's what we're going to explore, listening and reading as inputs, speaking and writing as outputs. And how combining them helps you to remember more and speak with confidence. So without further ado, let's jump in. First, we'll begin with listening. As you know, I'm obsessed with this skill, watching shows, listening to podcasts. I mean, it can be entertaining and practical. Plus, I've personally experienced the power of it from being completely lost in conversations to actually understanding people and communicating. It's exciting to feel that progress. I don't need to tell you if you're listening to this episode, you know the impact listening can have. But, and this is important, there are three things we should keep in mind. Number one, when finding audio content, make sure it's at your level or just above it. In the 1980s, there was a linguist named Stephen Krassian and he proposed what's called the input hypothesis, which suggests that learners acquire language when they are exposed to understandable input, slightly above their language level. In simpler terms, we acquire language, we learn it when our learning material is just a little bit challenging. For example, if I tell you a story and there are three to four words you don't know, you can probably guess the meaning of the new words from context and understand what's happening. Let me give you an example of this. Last year, I went hiking with my cousin from Spain and halfway up the mountain, we stopped at a small brook. The water was clear and cold and we sat down next to the brook to drink some water and rest our feet. Even if you don't know the word brook, be-r-o-o-k, you can probably guess from context that it means a small stream or river. Because there's clues. There's water, you're sitting next to it, you're drinking, you're resting. This is comprehensible input. So make sure other material you consume is not too difficult, otherwise you won't learn from context. The second thing that I think is important to recognize is that our memories aren't perfect. So let me ask you a question. I mentioned that a brook is a small river, like a stream. Do you feel confident using the word brook right now? Maybe, it's not too complex. But would you be ready to use that word next week after just hearing it in this episode? Probably not. And it's not your fault, as we say in English, it's in one ear and out the other. In other words, you heard something, but you didn't retain it. The new information is gone. It went in one ear and out the other. Now this is common according to studies in cognitive psychology. One famous statistic often cited in language research is that learners typically need to encounter a word between 6 and 20 times before it becomes part of their usable vocabulary between 6 and 20. So naturally we're not sponges for new information, which is important to know. Right? You'll stop beating yourself up when you don't remember something. It also raises an important question. How can we increase our chances of remembering new words? Just listen or read them 6 to 20 times? So that brings me to my third point. According to crashing, yes, we can listen to large amounts of comprehensible input. And it will allow you to learn vocabulary grammar and pronunciation naturally. Right? The point is it just needs to be a lot of information coming in. So if you're listening to this podcast, listen to a lot of episodes. Many teachers will tell you, "Repeat the audio. Repeat what you hear a second time or a third time." It does help with retention. Your brain will soak up patterns and pronunciation and grammar. And it'll retain vocabulary after repeated exposure. But you can do something more efficient. When you listen or read and then speak or write about it, something magical happens. Using a new word dramatically increases retention. So yes, you can just listen over and over again or you can use the new word and learn it faster. Let's elaborate. Study show that when you use a word in speech or writing, you force your brain to retrieve it from memory. And that retrieval process strengthens learning. There are two psychologists, Robert Bjork and Jeffrey Carpick, who demonstrated this in a very famous study. One group of students simply re-read material. When tested a week later, they remembered 40% of it. Another group studied the material once and then retrieved it from memory. In other words, they were forced to recall what they had learned. One week later, they remembered 61 to 70% of the information. Did you catch that? One group just re-read the material. So they just did the input. The other group retrieved information so they included an output. And that difference is huge. So how can we retrieve information? Doing activities like answering questions and taking quizzes. Summarizing a story. So if you listen to a podcast episode, summarize the story afterwards. Write it down or do that out loud. Maybe using new vocabulary in sentences. I like to write 10 new original. sentences with 10 words per episode. Not more, not less. It's pretty straightforward. Or just describing whatever you heard or read out loud to a partner. Produce something. So do yourself a favor and overlap the skills. Combine your input, your listening or your reading with an output, speaking or writing. It's proven to be effective and your memory will thank you. Which brings me to the second skill. Speaking. When I used to teach hours and hours of English classes each week, I'd occasionally have a new student. And oftentimes they'd come to me frustrated. They would say, "Shana, I just can't remember words. I'll be in a conversation and freeze. And I'm just not myself in English." Which is very relatable. I've felt that way before when there's a group of people. And you feel like you're not showing them who you are. Or you feel like what you're saying is too basic for your level. It's completely frustrating, especially when you study so much. So when students told me this, I'd be like, "Okay, let's do a quick assessment of how you spend your time learning. How much time do you spend listening? Reading, writing, and speaking." And when it got to speaking and writing, most people were speaking and writing for less than one hour per week. I'd say, speaking is like any skill. For example, basketball. Would you feel confident playing in a basketball game without having gone to practice? Hmm, probably not. You would do much better if you spent some time beforehand preparing. Speaking and writing are output skills. They force you to produce something, to recall information. And the more you force yourself to recall words and phrases, the more ready you will be to use them. But what's lovely about speaking and why it requires a lot of practice is because it touches on other areas of memory. Semantic memory is like, "Am I using this expression correctly?" So it's about meaning. You have the phonological memory. Do I sound okay? Motor memory, like your mouth movements. To produce sounds, you actually have to move your cheek muscles, your tongue. Your tongue placement matters a lot. Where your lips are. So there's a lot happening and it requires much more mental effort than listening alone. If you put the time into practicing that, that can lead to very effective learning. A while ago, I made an episode about five essential speaking tips for English learners, which covered many ways to practice speaking English for free. The problem with free is that it comes with a price, meaning there's some downsides. Right? So you can sit at home and talk to AI, although it's slightly impersonal, depending on who you are, maybe you don't care. In-person language meetings, require you to travel and you need to rely on yourself to commit, to getting to a location and making it happen. Finding a language partner, it's great if you can find the right person, but it takes time and effort to do that and to schedule with them. And the truth is they can cancel. And then if you manage to join big group sessions where you're not talking so much, you are actually practicing listening, not speaking. So yeah, it's good to be aware of what's actually happening. When are you speaking? When are you producing? And when are you actually listening? Knowing how important speaking is, it's essential to speak regularly. Even one hour a week can make a huge difference. Now, but finding real speaking practice isn't always easy, especially if you don't live abroad or have people around you to speak with. That's why I like using eye-talkie. For those of you who don't know what eye-talkie is, it's an online language learning platform where you can take one-on-one lessons with native speaking teachers. From 2014 until having kids, I taught there so I know how effective it is at building speaking skills and even listening skills. So now, 10 years later, I'm still using eye-talkie. But on the learning side, my daughters take classes there too. Even though my husband Lucas is Brazilian, I can't rely on him to speak Portuguese with my daughters all the time. And they need practice. So I went to the eye-talkie website and filtered for teachers based on our needs. Who's available after school? Do they specialize in teaching children? How much do the classes cost? Now, within seconds, hundreds of qualified teachers appeared on the screen. I watched some introductory videos and found Talita, whose warm and easy-going and uses games and visuals in class. Now, while I can pay per lesson and choose a time that fits into my busy schedule, I like to book five to ten classes at a time because it creates routine. Now, every Thursday afternoon, my girls hop into my office chair and talk with Talita. They sing, songs, and play games in Portuguese and Talita gives them encouraging feedback. So it's fun. If you're looking for a place to practice speaking, whether it's English or another language, I definitely recommend checking out eye-talkie to make sure you have your speaking practice scheduled. The first 50 learners who sign up with my exclusive promo code, American Pod, will get five dollars in free credits toward their first English class. Just spend ten dollars and get five dollars free. This offer is limited to the first 50 users, so click the link in the episode notes to grab it. I could talk about online language learning for days. It's how I actually met Lucas. I used to be his English teacher online. So yeah, you can really connect with people, and I am a strong believer that the return on the investment is huge. So we've talked about the value of listening and speaking and the fact that we should listen to comprehensible input and speak as often as possible, because it helps us to recall words, which helps us then remember them. So what about reading and writing? Reading is one of the fastest ways to build vocabulary. Did you know that? Studies on extensive reading, so reading long texts like books, show that learners acquire new words naturally through repeated exposure and context. So sort of the same thing that crash and said earlier on. For example, imagine you're reading the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, which we started reading here at home. The children step into a wardrobe and enter Narnia, a snowy, magical world, full of talking animals. The word wardrobe is never directly explained, but you know that there's clothes hanging in it, and it's a piece of furniture. I mean, you can kind of guess what it is. Right? And after seeing it a few times, you understand that word from context. That's how vocabulary grows naturally. Now, linguist Paul Nation found that, yes, learners do learn words when they encounter them multiple times in texts they understand. But ideally, where they know about 95 to 98% of the words already. So yeah, that's that's key and we'll get to that in a second. So remember, from before it takes six to 20 encounters for a word to become usable. So books naturally provide that repetition. If it's a main word in the story, it's going to keep coming up, sort of like the wardrobe. And that's when things stick in the long-term memory. One of the other things, one of the other reasons why reading is so useful is that written text expose you to two to three times more unique words than everyday speech. It's more complex, richer than what we actually say. And that's why when you're reading, whether it's articles, short stories, transcripts or books, you can expand your vocabulary. There's going to be words you don't hear as frequently in casual conversation. The tricky part is finding a book that's long, right, for extensive reading, and that's at the right level. I think it's useful doing a quick test, reading one page of the book, and if there are more than three to four unknown words, the book is probably too difficult. When you're not constantly stopping to look things up, you can follow the story, and that's when reading becomes enjoyable. "A enjoyment matters." Extensive reading by nature takes a long time. So you're going to want to pick up that book and start reading. It has to be motivating, not work. So more challenging texts still have value, but they're best kept short, like articles or short stories. So you can study them more intensively and actually finish them. So the longer texts, make sure they're at your level by doing that quick test of three to four unknown words only, and then if you're reading short texts, fine, they can be more difficult. Now here's the important part reading alone is not enough, because once again reading is the input, and every input is more powerful when you pair it with an output. So what can you do with what you read? Well, talk to a teacher about what you read. Ask AI for writing prompts based on your book. You can even do this chapter by chapter. I'm reading chapter seven of this book. Can you come up with interesting writing prompts that will help me utilize new vocabulary? You can also just simply write a summary of what you read or retell the story, retell the main points to yourself. Now why does this matter? Because if you only read, you may recognize words when you see them, but you'll struggle to use them. Speaking and writing force you to retrieve language, which strengthens memory and builds real fluency. So train your brain not just to recognize words, but to use them. And that brings me to the last section, which is on writing. Best for last? Hmm. Years ago when I was living in Sao Paulo in Brazil and desperately wanting to learn Portuguese, so I could talk to Lucas's friends and his family. I listened to a Brazilian Portuguese podcast and I would write original sentences with new vocabulary I heard. Sometimes I would get creative and write a story using the vocabulary. This was incredibly effective for me. Lucas would sit down and correct my stories, which is kind of cute because I had always been his English teacher and he was returning the favor for Portuguese. And nowadays we can write and have AI correct us, which is just amazing, isn't it? It's so easy to make writing a habit. Listen to something and write about it and then have AI correct you or read something and write about it and have AI correction. Writing is often the most neglected skill, but it's incredibly useful because when you sit down with a paper and pencil or on your computer, it gives you time to think and check vocabulary into notice mistakes. And that's where you can really learn. Say if you're writing stories day after day and it keeps mentioning that you don't understand the present perfect. I mean technically you can just ask AI, "Hey, I need a lesson on the present perfect." Or, "Hey, I wrote these five essays. Please find the common mistakes and come up with quizzes for me to improve." Right? It's a fantastic way to notice gaps in your knowledge and to recognize when you don't know vocabulary. What's lacking? Right? You can only know that when you're forced to produce something. So bringing this back to when I used to teach, I used to have my students write and sometimes I was shocked to find mistakes that I just did not hear while speaking and it really gave this opportunity to address them. One immediately effective thing that I think all learners should do is to consider their five best stories. The five best stories. Which stories do you retell most often? For me, it's how did Lucas and I meet? Okay, yeah, there's a story there. Why did I move to North Carolina? Definitely another story. Why did I start teaching English? I mean, there's some essential core questions that just keep coming up in conversation. So if you realize what your five stories are, write them down and take time to perfect them. Writing gives you that time and you can improve your phrasing and make that story so amazing so that when you have a conversation with someone in real life, you can tell those stories confidently in the way that they deserve retelling. There's a language researcher named Merrill Swain who proposed the output hypothesis, which argues that producing language through speaking or writing forces you to notice what you don't know and pushes you to refine your language to improve your phrasing. Speaking and writing helps you move from understanding language to controlling it. Controlling what you say, so knowing the impact of your words is a huge part of confidence. So how can you do that without considering how words come across? That's where writing comes in. So writing doesn't just improve writing. Once again, it helps you remember vocabulary better. It helps you consider grammar and it prepares you for conversation. So where does that leave us? What should the ideal learner do if they want their activities to be effective? Pair your inputs with outputs. So that's the end of today's episode. Language learning works best when the four skills overlap. You listen to podcasts like this one and expose yourself to comfortable input, material you mostly understand while picking up pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary along the way. But you also remember language much better when you activate it by taking quizzes, speaking or writing. And when in doubt, ask yourself, how much time is dedicated to each skill? It can be eye opening to do the math and that alone can give you direction. You can always sign up to eye talkie for one on one classes. If you need a speaking routine or if you just don't know where to find practice or you can sign up to the academy where I use the overlap method and the sort of fluency loop I like to call it, to ensure you absorb everything from the episodes. Hope you enjoyed this episode and until next time, bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the American English podcast. Remember, it's my goal here to not only help you improve your listening comprehension but to show you how to speak like someone from the States. If you want to receive the full transcript for this episode or you just want to support this podcast, make sure to sign up to premium content on American English. EnglishPodcast.com. Thanks and hope to see you soon.