Excerpt from How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately (Shekhtman): To the Reader from the Author

 

To the Reader from the Author

The book which you, dear reader, have picked up was written approximately twenty years ago. However, the reasons that brought it to the light of day then remain as important today as ever. The first of these reasons is the survival of foreigners who are living entirely surrounded by native speakers of the foreign language. I came to the United States with a decent level of English, but, naturally, I did not feel myself to be on a par with Americans. I am certain that a great many people are suffering and have suffered from this feeling of “linguistic inferiority.” Some people come to accept this feeling. Others try to improve their foreign language. Still others--and I belong to this group--try to find a set of strategies to help them to use the language that they have acquired more effectively. Back then I had already begun to realize the strategic significance of simplifying thoughts in order to be understood; after all, it is better to express a thought simply than not to express it at all or to express something that the native speaker either cannot understand at all or perceives as nonsense. 

The next step forward in the development of a system of strategies for using a foreign language came at the time of my teaching at the Foreign Service Institute of the U. S. Department of State. Students enrolled at this institution take a test at the end of their course of study, the results of which have a strong impact on their career. This is when I noticed that students who intuitively possess good strategic competence do better on the test than those who do not even if their level of knowledge of the language is practically the same. So, it was then that I developed my system of communicative rules and began to teach them to my students. The results were astonishing. Using military terms, the weapon of the student taking the test with no knowledge of communicative strategies was equivalent to a bow and arrow, whereas the weapon of the student who had at his or her command a set of strategic rules was a missile. The students simply went crazy over these rules, as they understood these rules to help them in the best sense to show what they knew of the language. 

There was something else that had a strong impact on my desire to write this book. I came to the United States from the Soviet Union. At the time, the U.S.S.R. had a planned economy, which completely subverted the market processes. In the country where I lived for almost forty years, the prices of goods were fixed by the government. So goods there, for all practical purposes, were not sold but given out or distributed, but suddenly, here in America, exposed to the nature of a free market, I saw for the first time that the essence of a normal economy is that everything is for sale, that everything can be considered a good. I also understood what the essence of the sale of any good was. The essence is that the seller always shows the attractive aspects of his goods and does not highlight the negatives. Whether one is selling an insurance policy or a book, a car or a house, a legal ruling or a political program and whether a real estate agent or the president of the country is doing the selling, the sales approach is always the same: talk up the positive attributes as much as possible and downplay the negative ones as much as possible. Likewise, speech is your good, which you sell through the process of communication. Sell it right. Show its positive sides, not its negative ones. It is precisely this that the strategic rules of communication will help you to execute. 

Nonetheless, the fact that this book was written many years ago makes it a little outdated. During this time, the system of strategic rules for the effective use of a foreign language that are described in this book became more developed and solidified. The strategic rules were codified in accordance with the type of communication; their significance was shown in relation to the aggregate of forms and content; their dependency on proficiency level was examined; and, most important, the possibility of using these rules as a teaching method was demonstrated.1 Indeed, the rules described in this book can be of considerable assistance both to students studying a foreign language and to teachers teaching it.

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