How to Become a C1/Advanced English Learner | Advice from Experts Paul Nation and Lindsay Clandfield

hello and welcome to this new video from the five minute exam english channel this video is for english students with a b1 or b2 level who want to progress to c1 we can say that b1 means intermediate b2 means upper intermediate and c1 means advanced it's not easy to become an advanced student of english many people quickly reach intermediate but then they have difficulty making progress this problem is called the intermediate plateau to help me explore this important topic i spoke to two experts on language learning and language teaching the first person is paul nation he's a professor of applied linguistics and he's written many books and articles on the best ways to learn and teach languages the second person is lindsay clanfield he's a teacher and a teacher trainer he speaks at conferences and he's written many books for language learners and language teachers so these are fantastic experts to listen to and i hope you learn a lot of information when you watch this video what are the attributes of an advanced language learner attribute is a skill or quality that a person has in order to do something well my main research area is vocabulary and so i'll answer largely from that perspective i'm glad that earlier you mentioned the the cefr levels because i that that's good because it provides a definition of what advanced means from a vocabulary perspective level level c begins i think at around 5000 words and so that means that what people would call an intermediate learner of english as a foreign language would be someone who knows up to about 5 000 words and if you want to become an advanced learner you need at least another four thousand words to take you to nine thousand now in vocabulary studies we call the words between the third thousand and the nine thousand the mid-frequency words of english so the the first three thousand words of the high frequency words of english everybody needs those they are the goal for people at an elementary level and uh and probably lower intermediate level but to move from intermediate to advanced you need to have a much larger vocabulary size and and the minimal vocabulary size is around about five thousand to nine thousand words in order to read an unsimplified text so that means a university textbook or a novel or a newspaper you need to know around 9 000 words so that you can then have understanding of 98 of the words in those texts it still means even with nine thousand words it still means there's going to be one or two percent of the words that's one or two out of every hundred or three or four or five words on a page of a book that you don't know but that's manageable so even with 9 000 words you there will still be words that you don't know so the 9 000 word goal is really important for learners who want to be advanced in their knowledge of the language because advanced learners should be able to deal with unsimplified normal native speaker texts to have a conversation you need somewhere the upper limit is probably somewhere around about 6 000 which means you can understand what the person is saying to you if they are a native speaker and you can probably yourself in terms of production get away with two or three thousand but it's better if you have a vocabulary of about six thousand words would you say it's more important to learn vocabulary over learning grammar no i wouldn't say that because my approach to language teaching methodology is to make sure that there's a balance of learning opportunities the way i try to make sure there's a balance of learning opportunities is by following a principle called the four strands and the principle of the four strands simply says that in a well-balanced language course you should give equal time to each of four strands and these strands are number one learning through listening and reading so learning through input and that means doing real reading and real listening where you're really trying to comprehend the messages that are coming to you strand number two is learning through output and that's learning through speaking and writing and once again not doing exercises or repetitions after the teacher or anything like that but really you know trying to actually communicate a spoken message to someone or trying to write a letter or an assignment or something like that the third strand is the strand of deliberate learning and the strand of deliberate learning involves giving attention to the language and focusing on learning vocabulary learning grammar learning strategies for dealing with difficult texts doing intensive reading learning language learning strategies and so on so it involves deliberate attention to language features into strategies and principles and that should make up only one quarter of the course time the final quarter of the course time should be fluency development and that means becoming fluent in each of the four skills of listening speaking reading and writing so well-balanced course gives equal amount of time over a period of say at least a month or so when you're doing the the calculation to the four strands of input output deliberate attention and fluency development and i'm afraid in a lot of courses about 90 percent of the time in the course is the deliberate learning strand and the learners really don't get the opportunity to make true use of the language through input output and fluency development so the number one thing i would look for would be is there a balance of learning opportunities if you want to learn about this some more about this you can go to my website and look around about 2007 i think there's an article called the four strands it's free for download there's also a book on my website which is free called what do you need to know to learn a foreign language and that that also outlines this idea of the four strands is it true that in order to become a c1 or advanced student you need some kind of natural gift for learning languages i think some people probably do have a gift but if you don't have that gift i think you can still learn a language very successfully i've met with a lot of very uh effective language learners and people who who speak like native speakers after several years of working on the language but one thing in common with all of those is that they work hard um i've got a friend in america for example who who's been learning spanish for many years and people's people comment on his spanish and say how good it is and say you must be very gifted what they don't realize is how much time that person spends on and how thoughtful and analytical he is what about his learning so i think that people who have a gift are people who probably very good at imitating and doing things like that and that's that's useful but if you don't have that you can still become highly proficient but you got to work hard a lot of people do things which don't bring a lot of success but there are ways of doing things which put good principles into practice and and these can bring success now you know the question is well what are these principles i guess well if you look in the booklet you know what you need to know to learn a foreign language i've outlined about half a dozen of the most important ones there and people can just go there and download that book free and learn about them so i think i'll have to finish the interview here i hope um i hope you've enjoyed listening to the professor's answers and i hope they've been useful for you and yeah i also recommend that you go and visit his website and look into the articles that he's told us about so once again thank you for talking to us for me an advanced level learner is comfortable enough to get by in most situations in the foreign language so they can make small talk about most things they can uh have a discussion with you uh they can understand most of the stuff that you would say to them they can understand most television shows radio podcasts etc they can express their ideas without having to reach for it that much you know so it's not so much of an effort for them to to use the language when you go from like beginner to elementary or from elementary to pre-intermediate it can sometimes go quite quickly with quite a big jump uh and which is very satisfying and it's very sort of like wow i'm i'm speaking german or i can understand this television show or i finally understand the lyrics to a song um whereas from intermediate or upper intermediate higher you hit that plateau what they call the intermediate plateau which is like a long period before those sudden jumps may happen and where in fact you may find and sometimes you're kind of going back um and so uh there are there are various things that that will happen at this plateau so sometimes it will be that you're receptive like so you're you're listening or your reading is moving quite quickly and you can do that but you're frustrated because you're speaking and your writing isn't catching up another thing that happens is um you make what they call fossilized errors so you're you're you're making the same kind of mistakes all the time and you know that you're making them this happened to me with spanish i knew those mistakes were happening and i i almost stopped caring and many people of course sign up for language courses in a classroom with a teacher but the problem is how do you know if you're getting a good lesson are there any signs to look out for i always thought that a good lesson for me as a learner was a lesson that when the when it came to an end i would look at my watch and i'd say is it already over lots of students will say a good teacher is a teacher one that they like that they can you know get along with that is empathetic to what they're what they're going through but also isn't afraid to push them so uh there's that other kind of you can't have the teacher who's really nice too nice but you never really learn anything because they never correct you so it's sort of a fine balance but those would be some of the things that i would say looking out for whether time is sort of disappearing when you've got the class are you being pushed um and are they empathizing with you when you're having difficulty and just one more question if i may if there are if there are any english teachers uh watching this video what can they do in the classroom um to as you say push uh their learners up up to see one or advanced yeah i mean here's where i find that for example published books and course books become less uh important or less essential for the higher level teachers so they'll be often using more authentic stuff i think one of the things are to push the vocabulary like like get the vocabulary beyond that sort of 3000 word for which is okay for intermediate up to like a 5 000 word limit so exploring learning new words uh new expressions synonyms other ways of saying the same thing and more importantly uh patterns in lexical patterns using chunks how words go with other words so uh and and even more especially ones which allow language to sound more natural so chunks that help mark the discourse you know things like as i was saying or uh getting back to what i was saying before and things like that that make you sound more natural and help buy you time so that's becoming awareness of awareness of those and and then and moving to using those as well um so lots of kind of conversation routines be trying to push the student out of the comfort zone of that kind of b1 plateau comfort zone where i can pretty much say a lot of stuff but i'm not able to go a bit further um you know and i always think that more listening more reading is always good more exposure um always will help this idea of fossilized errors are fossilized are these kind of errors with us forever or can we can we overcome them i think some of them can be overcome often they talk about how you will suddenly realize that you've made it and you'll suddenly be able or you'll suddenly realize that you're not making that mistake any longer um but that does mean that a teacher or somebody else will have to bring your awareness to it so the fossilized errors and there there are there are often ones i mean third person ass often becomes a fossilized error other kind of present perfect perfect aspect stuff becomes fossilized errors but uh having your attention brought to them so noticing them is one part of getting over that in fact that's been written about quite a lot schmidt's noticing theory um talks a lot about that like noticing the gap between what you're doing and and and a higher level um i don't think for example just doing gap fills on the fossilized errors is going to help i think it's because once you're kind of forced to kind of sit down and pay attention to it you may think yeah well i know this is a mistake but you're still making it so you have to become more conscious of how you're speaking and what you're saying maybe recording yourself uh on video or audio uh going over those kind of recordings with the teacher um teacher keeping a record of the mistakes that you're often making and maybe then thank you thank you very much for your time and thank you for your very interesting uh answers i'm sure they'll be useful for students and teachers who are watching well thanks very much for having me on always a pleasure uh to join people virtually or in real life when possible okay thanks take care thank you very much

Channel: 5-Minute Exam English

Views: 2,464

Keywords: How to become C1/advanced english learner, Paul Nation, paul nation, Lindsay Clandfield, lindsay clandfield, improve english, learn english, c1 english, C1 English, english vocabulary, paul nation four strands, four strands, lexical chunks, fossilised error, fossilized error, fossilisation, fossilization, advanced english, english lesson, B1 english, b1 english, B1 English, B2 English, B2 english, b2 english, intermediate, upper-intermediate, CEFR, cefr

Id: s9_t59_BdVc

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020