Why Adept English Listen & Learn Listening Practice Is The Best Way To Learn A New Language
Learning a new language can sometimes feel like swimming against the tide, but with the right tools and techniques, you can ride the waves to success. Just like how a skilled surfer learns to navigate the ocean, language learners can use methods like the Adept English Listen & Learn Method to effectively ride the currents of language acquisition. And just as a surfer must practice and hone their skills, language learners must consistently engage in practice and repetition to make progress. Remember, "practice makes perfect" when it comes to language learning!
#EnglishLearning #ListenAndLearn #LanguageScience
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional.
⭐ Stephen Fry
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More about this lesson
Our Learn English Through Listening podcast offers a fun and engaging way to improve your English listening skills and fluency. Our latest episode explores the science behind language learning, providing real-world examples and introducing our effective Adept English Listen & Learn Method. With personal experience and scientific studies to back us up, we offer a unique approach to language learning. Subscribe now and start improving your spoken English fluency today!
A different language is a different vision of life.
⭐ Federico Fellini
Our method of teaching people to speak English fluently is really good for people who are struggling with making progress in spoken English fluency.
- If you're not being able to understand English, don't worry, the Learn English Through Listening podcast offers real-world examples and practical tips to help you improve your listening skills.
- If you're struggling to communicate effectively in English, our podcast offers a variety of interactive exercises and engaging content to help you practice and improve your speaking skills in a fun and stress-free way.
- If you're feeling socially isolated due to language barriers, our podcast offers a supportive community of language learners and a variety of resources to help you connect with others and overcome any communication challenges you may face.
FAQ: Why you should I spend my valuable time on this lesson?
By participating in this lesson, you will gain a deeper understanding of the English language and the science behind the Adept English method of learning. This will help you to communicate more effectively with native speakers. It will boost your confidence and improve your overall English language proficiency, making it easier for you to achieve your personal and professional goals.
We know your time is precious, so lets not waste any of it. Maybe we can answer some of your questions here:
- What will I learn in this lesson? You will learn about the science behind language learning, specifically what happens in your brain when you learn a new language, and the results of scientific experiments on language learning.
- How will this lesson improve my English listening skills? This lesson will teach you effective methods for language learning, including the Adept English Listen&Learn Method, which can help improve your English listening skills.
- Can I practice my English language skills during this lesson? Yes, this lesson includes listening practice and introduces a scientific study, which supports the Adept English Listen&Learn Method, giving you the opportunity to practice understanding scientific language.
- Is this lesson suitable for beginner language learners? Yes, this lesson is suitable for beginner language learners, as it covers fundamental aspects of language learning and provides actionable tips to improve your English listening skills.
Most Unusual Words:
- Precious: Very valuable or important.
- Scientific: Related to science, or done in a careful and systematic way.
- Fantastic: Very good or amazing.
- Immersion: Being completely involved in something.
- Mechanism: A part of a machine or a set of parts that work together.
- Experiment: A test done to learn something or to see if something works.
- Participant: A person who takes part in something.
- Explicit: Stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt.
- Implicit: Suggested without being directly expressed.
- Repetition: Doing or saying something again and again.
Most Frequently Used Words:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| Language | 35 |
| Learning | 18 |
| Study | 12 |
| Learn | 11 |
| Through | 11 |
| About | 9 |
| English | 9 |
| Words | 8 |
| Brain | 7 |
| Learned | 7 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
The mp3 audio and pdf transcript for this lesson is now part of the Adept English back catalogue . You can still download and listen to this lesson as part of one of our podcast bundles.Transcript: How To Improve Your Spoken English Fluency With Science-Backed Listening Practice
Evidence for the Listen & Learn Method for learning a language
Hi there. Today let’s talk about language learning. Let’s talk about what’s happening in your brain when you’re learning a language. And let’s talk about the results of some studies, some scientific experiments on language learning and how best to do it. Let’s look at the science behind why methods like ours, the Adept English Listen&Learn Method - actually work when you’re learning a language! So in this podcast, I’m going to give you a bit of my personal experience of this - and I’m going to introduce you to a scientific study, which supports our method. So you’ll get some practice here too at understanding ‘scientific study language’ as well!
Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.
The Most Common 500 Words Course can help you!
If you find these podcasts difficult to understand and you really have to work hard at them, then don’t forget - help is at hand. Use our Most Common Five Hundred Words Course - it’s the same method - Listen&Learn, my voice - but I only use the most common words in English. This gives you fantastic practice at the basics in English - and will make the understanding the podcasts, which use a lot more words - so much easier! But remember that most of ordinary English conversation is made up from these most common 500 words and most of podcasts are too.
Boost Your Learning With Adept English
The ‘immersion technique’ for learning language
Today’s subject! One of the most important elements of learning a language to fluency - meaning so that you can actually speak it - the technique of ‘immersion’. That’s ‘immersion’, IMMERSION - meaning that ‘you learn the language by hearing the language’. If you’re using ‘immersion technique’ to learn a language, you just hear that language. You don’t translate, you don’t learn vocabulary lists - you learn by listening and work out the meaning by context.
My experience of different language learning techniques
When I was at school, I learned Latin, French and German. Latin - dead language - we didn’t speak it, so fluency didn’t matter. French was taught very traditionally, with equal focus on reading, writing, listening and speaking. But at age 12, I started to learn German - completely different. A breath of fresh air - frische Luft. Our German teacher, always known to us as ‘Frau Peel’ did the whole lesson in German. Right at the start, we didn’t understand her or what was going on in the lesson ‘Hilary, mach das Fenster auf, bitte’ she might say - and you’d have to work it out ‘What’s she telling me to do?’ But actually that was the best way. I still remember words like ‘Der Tonbandgerät’, ‘Der Projektor’ - it was a while ago, when I was in school - this is old technology! But the point is - I remember those words even now. Frau Peel would occasionally reward us by saying ‘Ausgezeichnet!’ when we got something right. I remember these words because they were part of the normal conversation in the lesson - that’s the beauty of the immersion technique.
So ‘Frau Peel’s’ method of learning German was ‘immersion’ - everything in German. So that you get used to hearing and understanding the language for real, live communication. It made the language relevant - and it made remembering more automatic. The learning of grammar structures is also more automatic when you do this - it ‘sounds right’, without you having to think about it. And this is what we offer you, with our Adept English podcasts and courses - the opportunity to listen to as much spoken English as you have time for.
Listening Lessons
A scientific study looking at different learning techniques
So what are the scientific studies that support this idea? Well, this is one I’ve come across.
Kara Morgan-Short, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, did an experiment in 2014 to test how good, how effective different methods of learning languages were. The researchers, the people at the university invented or ‘made up’ an artificial foreign language, which was then taught to people in the study. They used an artificial language partly so that everyone learning was coming from a start point of knowing nothing. If it were a real language they’d used, then possibly different study participants would have had different knowledge of that language from the start. The other reason for using an artificial, or made up language? It made it simpler and therefore more measurable, more able to be measured. Experiments are better where there’s a lot of control, so most things can be kept the same for all participants in a study. This reduces what we call ‘background noise’.
The word ‘participant’, PARTICIPANT just means ‘someone participating’, ‘someone taking part’. So the ‘participants of the study’ means the people who were being experimented on.
So these participants in this study were separated into two groups. The first group learned the artificial language through explanation, being taught grammar and rules. They were given traditional style language lessons in other words. The second group learned the artificial language through ‘immersion technique’ - through hearing nothing but that language, like when you learn your own language as a child and you have to work things out through context. What the researchers found was that both groups learned, but the learners in the second group, who were immersed in the language, learned differently. When their brains were imaged - their brain activity was much more like that of a native speaker - like that of someone who learned a language as a child. And what’s more six months later, there was a ‘follow up’ - another set of questions and tests for the study participants. And the researchers found that the group who’d learned the artificial language through immersion - well, they remembered better, six months later. And of course, they couldn’t have been studying the language since - because it was an artificial language. They had no access to it. So this study seems to show that learning through immersion is more effective than learning through traditional methods.
In the study, they did also find individual differences - some learners were better than others at automatically picking up rules of grammar and vocabulary by hearing. And yet of course, our brains are designed to do this - if you can speak your own, native language then you’ve already done it! So it may just be that some people need more hours listening than do others to achieve the same result. It’s the same as other learning. Some people take longer to learn to ride a bike or ski than do others.
Can adults learn a second language as well as children do?
What Professor Kara Morgan-Short and her colleagues found in another study from 2012 - there’s a general belief that adults cannot learn a second language as well as children can. But what the researchers found in this study was that it was much more about the method of learning, than about age of the learner.
To give you a bit more practice at more difficult English and because it’s interesting, I’m going to give you some quotes from the study. Notice here they call your first language L1 and the language you’re learning, L2. I’ll quote from the study and then I’ll give you an easier version in English of the meaning of the quote. Here goes - this is good practice. First quote.
📷
A young man learning a new language. Break language barriers, improve spoken English fluency today. Join thousands of learners benefiting from our podcast - subscribe now!
Practice understanding more difficult English
‘It is widely believed that adults cannot learn a foreign language in the same way that children learn a first language. However, recent evidence suggest that adult learners of a foreign language can come to rely on ‘native-like’ language brain mechanisms. Here we show that the type of language training crucially impacts this outcome’. So in simpler English, they’re saying here that there’s a belief that adults can’t learn languages as well as children can. But that there’s now evidence that adult language learners can develop mechanisms - that means ‘ways of working’ in their brains, which are similar to those used by people in their first language. And actually it’s the method of learning, that determines that, more than the age of the learner.
Another useful piece of vocabulary when you’re reading about this, as well as L1 and L2 - what I call traditional classroom based language learning, where the rules of grammar are explained and vocabulary is learned in lists - they call this ‘explicit learning’, EXPLICIT. Whereas what we’re calling ‘immersion learning’ - just hearing the language a lot and learning from that - they call that ‘implicit learning’ - IMPLICIT.
More practice at understanding more difficult English
A second quote for you to practise on. The conclusion of this study says ‘In summary, in this study learning under an implicit input condition designed to approximate immersion led to the full spectrum of native-like brain patterns for aspects of language processing, whereas learning under an explicit input condition designed to approximate traditional classroom settings did not’. In more simple words - that means that in summary, learning a second language through immersion, through hearing nothing but that language resulted in brain mechanisms more like those of native speakers. But learning explicitly meaning in a traditional classroom based style, did not do this!
Download The Podcast Audio & Transcript
What was also clear from this study was that there was benefit in both types of learning. People who did traditional ‘explicit’ classroom learning, did succeed in learning the language to a point. But if you’re really looking to be fluent, really looking to be proficient in a language at a higher level, my sense is that the implicit learning technique, immersion is the best - because it becomes automatic. You don’t have to think about it - it’s just as if you’re speaking your own language. And this study is saying that learning a language through immersion, means the mechanisms in your brain when you’re using the language - well they look like those of native speakers. And this can actually be seen through scientific brain imaging techniques. What more evidence do you need?
Goodbye
Let us know what you think of this! And don’t forget to listen to this podcast a number of times. Repetition helps you develop fluency.
Enough for now. Have a lovely day Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And, please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com
Links
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- Explicit and Implicit Second Language Training
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