Tuesday's Tip for Language Learning #26: Tactics and Strategies - Sharpening Your Skills
Excerpt from Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star
Sharpening Your Skills
Sharpening your skills
means becoming better at reading, writing, listening, and speaking. (For this
book, we will leave translation and interpretation out of the equation; those
are special skills for individuals who have already gained considerable
proficiency in the language, but if your goal is to be a translator or
interpreter, yes, indeed, you will have another set of skills to sharpen.)
Your strategies for
sharpening your skills are going to look differently depending upon your reason
for studying your language. Your tactics for reaching your strategic goals,
commonly also considered learning strategies,[1] will also differ depending
upon your goal.
Strategies
Before you can decide how
to go about improving your reading, writing, listening, and speaking, you need
to identify to what extent you need each of these skills and how well you have
to be able to use it. That directly relates to two things: (1) why you took the
course and (2) what you plan to do with the language in your life. Those can be
the same thing, or they can be very different things. Perhaps you took the
course because your job requires it, but you have a 5-year commitment to that
job and don’t plan to use the language again. Or, perhaps after your job
commitment, you would like to teach the language. Or, perhaps you took the
language because you married a native speaker of the language and want to be
able to communicate better with your spouse and in-laws. All of these will
result in different strategic goals.
Here are some guidelines to
help your planning process:
·
Reading: Your reading goal will depend
upon your answers to the following questions:
o
What kinds of things will you be reading
once you have attained your skill-level goal? Will it be standard daily fare
like newspapers? Or, are you into literature, even planning a major in the
literature of one or more of the countries where your language is spoken? Or,
are there professional documents you will need to be able to read for a job
requirement? Clearly, then, you will need to develop strategies to handle
whichever genre you will be reading—and all have quite a different structure
and set of expressions in most languages.
o
Is one of your goals to become a
translator? (Okay, so we cannot completely omit the question of translation and
interpretation in this book.) If so, are you planning on a specific field—law,
military, literary, medical (the list is almost endless, of course)? In that
case, you will need to develop deep expertise in the vocabulary, expressions,
and content of that field. Alternatively, do you just want to be able to do
some translation to bring in some moonlighting funds? In that case, you will
need to develop quite a breadth of vocabulary and expressions in a number of
fields but will not likely be able to develop depth in all of them; perhaps you
can single out 3-4 that are the most interesting to you.
·
Writing:
o
Writing is a skill that many students
dislike—and insist that they will never need. Don’t be so sure! You may end up
having to write notes to your host family if you end up on study abroad. Or, if
you marry a native speaker, very likely you will be writing more than you had
planned. Some jobs require writing, too; if so, figure that kind of writing
into your goals.[2]
o
If you have a desire to become either a
translator or interpreter, you will need to be able to write. If you are
translating into your foreign language, you definitely will need writing
skills!
o
Do you want to be a good reader? Then, you
need good writing skills. Writing will help you understand language expression
and text structure much more thoroughly than just a lot of reading will.
·
Listening: Your listening goal will depend
upon your answers to the following questions:
o
What kinds of things will you be listening
to once you have attained your skill-level goal? Will it be standard daily fare
like soap operas, newscasts, and friends (or spouse)? Or, are you into movies,
even planning a major in the film studies of one or more of the countries where
your language is spoken? Or, are there professional kinds of oral texts you
will need to be able to understand for a job requirement? Clearly, then, you
will need to develop strategies to handle whichever genre you will be listening
to—and all have quite a different structure and set of expressions in most
languages.
o
Is one of your goals to become a interpret?
If so, are you planning on a specific field—diplomacy, medical, treaty
management (the list is almost endless, of course)? In that case, you will need
to develop deep expertise in the vocabulary, expressions, and content of that
field. Alternatively, do you just want to be able to do some interpretation to
bring in some moonlighting funds? In that case, you will need to develop quite
a breadth of vocabulary and expressions in a number of fields but will not
likely be able to develop depth in all of them; perhaps you can single out 3-4
that are the most interesting to you.
·
Speaking: Your speaking goal will depend
upon your answers to the following questions:
o
Speaking is a skill that some learners in
professional courses that are focused on the ability to translate or interpret
from the foreign language into the native language (the most common combination)
insist that they will never need. Don’t be so sure! If someone knows that you
know a language and is with someone who speaks only that language, you may be
expected to step up and helped out. That has happened to me more often than I
can probably recall. In one case, I interpreted for speakers of Polish,
Russian, Italian, and Spanish on an air flight to Frankfurt that was turned
back with mechanical problems—and that unexpectedly earned me a free
first-class ticket! I have experienced
the need for my speaking skill many, many times. There are also cases where
help is needed and not available—if only you had learned to speak the language.
o
If you have a desire to become an
interpreter, you will need to be able to speak your target language even if
your preference and intention is to interpret only into your own language. You
will need to make arrangements with, answer questions from, and otherwise
communicate with native speakers. If you are interpreting into your foreign
language, you definitely will need really good speaking skills!
o
Do you want to be a good listener? Then,
you need good speaking skills. speaking will help you understand language
expressions and text structure much more thoroughly than just a lot of listening
will—and faster. When we can make the sounds, we can hear them better. When we
learn to use proper intonation patters in the foreign language, we are not put
off when we hear them.[3]
identify
what you want to do with your language = shape your learning more effectively
Tactics
Once you have completed an insightful analysis of your
needs and established your strategies for acquisition of the four language
skills, you need to figure out what methods (tactics) you will need to reach
your objective. The tactics may be quite fluid, flowing between the four skills
since writing supports reading and speaking, reading supports listening and
speaking, speaking supports listening and writing, and listening supports
speaking and reading. You cannot pull these four apart; they are best friends.
If you want to become more skilled, you have to be
wise in how you go about building those skills. Listening “harder,” just like
“study harder,” is not good advice. What does “harder” mean? Most people cannot
answer that question, other than to say to do more. More of the same, though,
rarely helps. Study, listen, read, write, speak more wisely—that is what will
help you improve. What “wiser” means you can define. Those are your
tactics.
Listed here are some ways
to think about how to approach your tasks tactically. Pick those that work best
with your strategic goals. If you find yourself wanting more, read one of the
books listed in the reference section on learning strategies.
·
Reading:
o
At the sentence or paragraph level, if you
have trouble understanding a complicated sentence unwind and put it into your
native-language structure. In English, this would be SVO. Find the subject, a
simple noun, not the modifiers. Then, find the main verb, the simple verb, not
the whole very phrase. Then, find the object of the verb if there is one. So,
the sentence, the kind and compassionate president of the well-known and
highly respected Save the Dogs Foundation proudly and formally hung a silver
framed picture of members of the organization who had been recognized by the
city council for their great work becomes president hung picture—a
very clear, concise encapsulation of the content of the sentence. After that,
you can go back and fill in all those modifiers, figuring out what the
individual words mean as you do so, including the relative clause (which can
also be broken down the same way). Once you have the correct skeletal sentence,
you really have the key you need to unlock the sentence, paragraph, or text.
o
At the text level, find the topic
sentence. So, you have been reading for a while, right? Think about how you go
about reading. Do you pay attention to the first sentence of the first
paragraph and use that to figure out what the article was going to be about? If
you are a native speaker of English, you do. Will this work effectively in your
target language? For most European languages, yes. For languages like Arabic,
no. So, if the approach you use for your native language works in your foreign
language, use it. If you have learned that your language organizes text
differently, approach the text the same way a native speaker would. Perhaps
that is to skim the first couple of pages until you get to the topic sentence.
Or, perhaps, reading the ending will tell you about the beginning. If you don’t
know, ask your teacher—your teacher knows. If you do not have a teacher, ask
your mentor or any native speaker who is helping you—they know, too.
o
Scope
out the story. Find details that support the topic sentence. Start out by
scanning for those details. Then skim the rest of text to get a general idea of
what the story is about. Then, read the whole article with the topic sentence
and whatever details you have in mind. Try to figure out the vocabulary and
grammar you do not know through logic, comparing with what you do know,
breaking the words into their component parts, and using context as to what the
words “should” mean. Only then, resort to dictionary help. The more you can do
on our own now, the more you will be able to do later. The more you rely on a
dictionary for all your help, the more you will be stuck with having to use the
dictionary later.
o
Look
at the bigger picture. Texts can deliver factual information, directly or
indirectly deliver an opinion, or express irony or satire. Texts have differing
purposes: to inform, to entertain, or to persuade. Ask questions to figure that
out. What is the purpose of the text you are reading? Who wrote the article? (Read about him
on the Internet, in Wikipedia, or in other publications by him or her.) For
whom was the text written? Why? (Figuring out why is called
"reading between the lines.") When was the text written, what was
going on in politics or society at the time and how might this relate to the
text? This is called reading beyond the text.
o
Read out loud. You read right. Reading out
loud is looked down upon nowadays as a waste of time (and, in class, some
learners are embarrassed when asked to read out loud), but reading out loud
will do two things for you: (1) if you are someone who learns by hearing, it
will help you understand the words better, and (2) if you are a visual learner,
you will need to read aloud with someone who can correct your pronunciation
since visual learners often do not “hear” how words sound and then, though they
can understand what they read, they cannot understand what they hear—you don’t
want to end up with that dilemma.
·
Writing
o
Use models. Whatever level of proficiency
you are at, models exist. Some may be teacher-prepared student materials.
Others may be very simple stories. Yet others, when you are ready, may be
professional documents, real literature, or other texts meant for native
speakers. When you use models instead of dictionaries, you are more likely to
get the grammar, expressions, and sentence/text structure right. Language
learners who have reached near-native levels of proficiency report that they
pretty much exclusively use models.
o
Perfect your understanding of genre. While
you will need to be at a pretty strong proficiency level to do this, once you
are ready, practicing genre shifts will quickly and greatly increase your
writing skill. So, for example, take a newspaper article and rewrite it as a
personal letter; then, rewrite it again as if it were a novel. When you can do
that easily, you will have made serious progress in acquiring writing skills.
·
Listening:
o
Focus on what you know. At early
levels, there may be many words that fly right past you. As scary as that
seems, let. It is not useful to catch words if you don’t know what they mean.
Listen instead for the words you do know.
o
Listen for key words. Once you have
practiced focusing on what you know, you can start picking out from them the
words that seem to have special important. If you are listening to a weather
broadcast, then the key words would be related to weather. Actually, that
parallels what native speakers do. They do not listen to every word; they would
get bogged down if they did. They pick up on the key words, and the other words
fall in line because they know the templates, or scripts.
o
Rely on the script—and learn as many
of them as you can. Scripts are words that always appear in texts of various
types: a wide range of news reports, science reports, and so on. In the case of
the weather broadcast, the script may start out date it will be how
and how in the time. (Today it will be warm and sunny in the
morning.) The words in italics are the key words: today, warm, sunny, morning.
The scripted words it will be, and, in the, are always there; they fade
into the background for native speakers (who could call them up if needed
because they are always the same). So, too, they should fade into the
background for you for efficient and native-like listening.
o
Build the story. Frequently, there
will be words (sometimes many of them) that you do not know. Don’t listen to them;
they will only distract you. Listen for the words you do know. When strung
together, what might they mean? Guess, then check.
o
Use background knowledge. If you
think you are listening to a text about tourists picking cotton in Yalta (an
example taken from an actual class I once taught), give it the common sense test.
Do tourists pick cotton? Does cotton grow in Yalta? In both cases, the answer
is no. So, you are misunderstanding something. Listen again! (By the way, the
greater your background knowledge, the more you will automatically understand.
So, read everything you can about the target culture.)
o
Where you can, control how you
receive the oral input That is easy with digital input; just replay it. Likewise,
when talking to a native speaker, control your interlocutor. If you miss
something, ask for a repeat either directly, or better, subtly, as in “why did
you mean by that?” rather than, “repeat, please.”
o
Increase the frequency. The best
way, regardless of or in addition to the tactics your use, listen a lot, with
regular frequency. The very best way to learn to listen well is to listen
frequency and regularly.
·
Speaking[4]
o
Models. As with writing, the best way to
speak correctly is not trying to string together words from a dictionary, using
memorized grammar rules. It is to follow a model where that has already been
done, and all you have to do is change the players, the actions, the topic.
Dialogues (as much as they are not popular for teaching these days) and role
plays can provide these models for you.
o
Islands. Shekhtman (2013) refers to
memorized short and medium-length texts that you will often be saying, for
example, your biographic information. Memorizing these texts to the point of
automaticity means that you do not need to think about them while speaking, and
your speech will be correct.
o
Simplification. One of the biggest
mistakes learners make when speaking at lower levels of proficiency is try to
be as erudite in the target language as in their native language. Of course,
that is not possible, and the attempt usually ends up with the learner doing
much direct translation from native to target language, with the result often
being unintelligible. By using only what you know, you will end up with
simple—but accurate—language.
o
Find opportunities to speak. As with other
skills, the more you use the skill, the better you become at using the skill.
Find opportunities to speak with native speakers as often as you can. Help the
emigrants in your community to learn the ways of life or help them with a
problem (children at school, trying to rent an apartment, whatever they might
need). Attend literary events arranged for native speakers. The list is limited
only to the resources of your community and your imagination. (And there are
always online friendships via Skype on online speaking partner programs.)
avoid
confusion from the abundance of learning strategies lists = pick tactics that
meet your learning strategies goals
The four skills—reading,
writing, listening, and speaking—are best friends, supporting each other. Pull
one away, and the support weakens, so give fair attention to all. This is the
best strategy of all.
an
overwhelming number of learning strategies is available to help with all of the
skills; don’t be overwhelmed—select out the ones that work for you and your
goals
[1]
Most of the literature, including the very best literature and research on
learning strategies do not separate strategies and tactics the way I have done
in this book. For most intents and purposes, there is no real need to do so.
The teacher who is trying to help the student apply more strategies and more
pertinent strategies does not need to think long-term, not really. The focus is
on immediate improvement and developing strategies that the learner can always
have access to. For learners reading this book for whom language learning
success extends beyond the current course or even beyond any course, the focus
is both long-term and short-term. I chose, rather arbitrarily, though quite in
keeping with dictionary and military definitions, the terms strategies
and tactics to delineate what is long-term and what is short-term. The
former is for planning; the latter is for studying. This division, I believe,
helps identify the purpose of actions that generally carry the label, learning
strategy.
[2] A
common job as an intern abroad or for working abroad is to copyedit/proofread
for a publishing house. In that case, you will need very good writing skills
and a good knowledge of grammar. If you have lesser language skills and are
hired for editing books in your own language, you will need good writing skills
in your language. With the exception of grammar and stylistic differences, good
writing skills do transfer from language to language.
[3]
Conversely, just as reading can help writing by providing models, listening can
improve speaking by providing models.
[4]
One of the best books I have seen for teaching rapid acquisition of good
speaking skills is How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately
(Shekhtman, 2013). I have included a few of Shekhtman’s tools here and highly
recommend reading his book for the remainder if you find the islands and
simplification tools helpful.
See more posts about/from this book.
See more posts about language learning.
See more Tuesday tips.
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