How to study English well (with Paul Nation) | 4 techniques to learn English faster

there is no doubt that this is the best time in history to learn a language especially English we are surrounded by a world of English content English language learning apps English courses English teachers information but one important question still remains what do we do with all this information how do we study how do we learn a language one man who knows the answer to this question is Paul nation he has been studying language acquisition and language teaching methodology for more than 50 years in this interview he talks about the four strands and by following this simple concept both teachers and students can find success at teaching and learning a language this is an edited version of our interview if you would like to listen to the full version you will find a link down in the description box below where you will also find a link to paul's website I hope that you enjoyed this interview mr. Paul nation thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today yeah you're welcome so I think that in in the world of you know language learning and vocabulary learning you're definitely considered you know one of the the experts in the field and and I know that you've developed these not just in vocabulary learning but in language learning in general you've developed these four strands which are meaning focused input meaning focused output language focused learning and fluency development and and I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about exactly what you know in what each one of those strands are well the reason that I I ended up with something like the four strands is that I'd read a lot of research but I was having trouble connecting it to each other so you know you'd read one piece of research about writing and how you know what was important for writing and then you'd read another piece of research something to do was speaking and in the end you'd sort of see well and then about you know research about deliberate learning and so on so I thought we need some sort of framework to sort of connect these to each other and so I eventually came up with the idea of the four strands and it was it's it's not a very profound idea but it actually has some really profound implications I think and the problem is that there is no research which I could there's no research which actually supports the idea of the four strands as four strands and I don't really see how you could sensibly do research which would support the idea but there is evidence for each one of the strands so there's very strong evidence for example that they should be learning through comprehensible input and and Steve crashing has been one of the people who has really advocated this very strongly indeed but there's also evidence that it's really important to learn through output as well and that that input by itself is not enough there's also very strong evidence for deliberate learning and that is you know doing study of language features particularly for vocabulary and there's plenty of evidence for the importance of fluency development and how you know you can know the language and yet not be able to use what you know and so it's important to be able to make the best use of what you already know and so I just put these these together into the four strands the the implications which come from the four strands I think are important and the implication is three quarters of your time that is meaning focused input meaning focused output in fluency development should be spent actually you using the language because those three strands of input-output and fluency development all require a focus on communication and a focus on the message so if we regard reading as communication in writing to someone to tell them something as communication or even writing an article you know to get to communicate ideas to people if we see all of those as communication then three-quarters of the time in a language course should be spent actually using the language I suspect and and from my personal experience I think that that is not how a majority of language classrooms are are kind of set up and I think that probably a lot of learners would be very surprised to hear that something like kind of sitting down with a book and and and you know memorizing stuff you you you know would be something that you would only spend maybe 25% of your time doing rather than 90% so I'm sort of wondering how you feel about kind of the state of the industry at the moment yeah well I I think there's just far too much teaching going on and this isn't a new view I mean I've looked back at the writings of Michael West for example who's one of my heroes in the field of vocab Rhys tutty's and we'll overall let me think there is probably 80 years ago West was saying things like you know there is too much teaching going on in classrooms and not enough learning going on and so so you know it's by no means a new idea and the problem is that teachers believe I think that learning comes from teaching and if you take a fairly narrow view of teaching to include part of what is language focus learning then of course yes there is far too much teaching going on because as you say 80 90 percent of the time that learners spend and language courses seem to be on language focus learning so it's really important to realize that things like extensive reading are actually major contributor or can be major contributors to learning now one of my colleagues who I respect very much Bartle alpha argues that in language you know that extensive reading is important but in language courses most people learn vocabulary through deliberate study and she's right but it shouldn't be like that people should be spending you know three quarters of the time actually learning vocab Reath reading learning vocab you through listening putting vocab Rhian to use through speaking and writing and about a quarter of the time actually studying vocabulary or being taught vocabulary so I think that's one of the more profound implications of the four strands and that is we have to see deliberate learning as playing a relatively small but an important part and in that strand of deliberate learning teaching is only a part of that strand so it's really less than 1/8 of a course you know I know a majority of you know EFL classrooms are sort of centered around the workbook but it seems that a lot of your work shows that you know workbooks are not really where the learning happens well I've just been working on workbooks actually trying I wrote a wrote a my favorite book that I've written is the book called what should every EFL teacher know and I thought because I'd really I'd read about two or three other people's attempts to write a similar kind of book and I looked at those at Tim's and thought hell I can do better than that and then and then I thought I've been working in this field for 50 years if I can't just sit down and say what I think is important for someone you know for for a teacher to know and for a teacher to do that I've been wasting my time so I wrote that book probably within a couple of weeks because it didn't require lots of research it required lots of drawing on research aren't already read and and and experience and things and it's actually the book I felt most satisfied with after writing it and I I've been recently working on a simpler version of that book that book is very simple and straightforward and it's written within roughly a three thirty three to four thousand word vocabulary but I'm writing a book for teachers who have very little training and who teach in circumstances where they have to use a course book and so on and so by looking at that and applying the idea of the four strands I sort of came to the conclusion that at the very most a course book can provide about half of the material that you need for a well-balanced language course because you you can't exclude extent you can't include sorry extensive reading within a course book because in extensive reading involves each person reading at their own level and reading very large quantities of material not a few thousand words but but you know hundreds of thousands of running words and you just can't put all that in the course book and even if you could you you wouldn't be at the right level for some of the students and in the course in the class because every class has a range of proficiencies and it's the same with the extensive listening you can't include all of that and then you know you could include a reading fluency course I suppose within the course book but even then you're looking at quite a substantial addition to the course book so course books can't cover everything and I reckon it the best if you've got the best designed course book you're lucky to cover half of what needs to be covered in terms of opportunities for learning I think this may be this links back to your kind of original you know the thing you were talking about before that there's too much teaching going on like because I know that you sort of see the role of the teacher not as a person who kind of delivers knowledge but more you know as an abstract sort of you know an abstract figure in the classroom who is there to motivate and guide and maybe not to do so many explicit things is that is that a fair summary of your ideas or not not really I tried to list and whenever I make a list I like to rank the list because there's not much point in making lists unless you signal what's important in it and so on and I put the teachers number one job as a planner and the two major ways of planning which I looked at but there are probably other ways is first of all to make sure that there's a balance of opportunities across the four strands and then the second aspect of planning is to make sure that you're focusing on material which is appropriate to the student that is you're not teaching really low frequency vocab rebut your teaching vocab read which is the next most important level of vocab for learners to to learn and the same with grammar features and so on the second job of the teacher is probably to organize and that is to get the classroom working to organize extensive reading to organize conversation activities to organize extensive listening and to set up procedures and things like that so the learners can get on and do the work in the third job of the teacher is to train and that is to train the learners in taking some responsibility for their own learning and to learn strategies which really help them to become independent from teachers and I sort of at times I want to raise the ranking of the training one because I think a very important job of teachers is to train in in in real life I've come across a few examples which have been quite striking for me about the effect of training people how to learn I've got a sore knee well it's not that sore but my knees a bit weak so I went to see a physiotherapist the physiotherapist turned out to be a friend of one of my relatives but that that's neither here nor there and he was telling me how he became a physiotherapist when he was working he was working in the in the post office a sort of telecom thing with my nephew actually this is the relative and while they were there they had to go on training courses and he went on a training course and on one of the training courses they gave him some hints about how to go about learning the material related to his job and he he sort of took these points and and applied them and found well when I was at secondary school I thought I was dumb because I wasn't doing well at school at all and now that someone showed me how to do these things I find that I can do them quite easily now the the things that he was told were actually not that great I mean there's much better advice that could have been given but he was told things like you know get the important points write them on post-it notes stick them on your refrigerator stick them on the wall and things like that you know now there's much better training that you can do you like teaching people the importance of retrieval for example and the importance of spaced repetition the importance of spaced retrieval the importance of quality of mental processing you know these things are very well proven ways but what he did was then when he realized that he was good at you know he wasn't done he was good at learning he then said well I always wanted to be a physiotherapist so then he enrolled at University for a course in physiotherapy and now he's a really highly regarded physiotherapist doing the job he loves and in a way that's traced traceable back to a teacher who said I'm not here just to teach the things I'm here also to show you how you can learn and go about learning so I you know I'm a great espouse or of you know the autonomy movement I just think that you know people are really primarily responsible for their own learning but teachers have a risk once ability to show them how to do this well you know and it's important then that that part of a teacher's job is not only saying here's what you need to know but here's what his his how you could know it and here's our research shows you can know these things and learn them well you know and now I've forgotten the fourth and fifth jobs the teacher now but does something like to test oh yes that's right to test learners so that you can find out where they are they can find out where they are and they're learning and the teacher can see if they're making progress in the fifth job is to actually teach and teaching teaching is important but it's at the bottom of the list you know well actually this this was actually yeah a piece of research which really surprised me of yours from from 2000 where you and Marcella whoo and yeah and you I don't know if you were the first to discover it but you you proved that you need to know 98% of vocabulary in a text for it for you to have unassisted comprehension I mean that blows my mind I would have my instinct would have told me that you know maybe like 75 percent or something I wasn't the first as the scale of that you can go back to Michael West in Michael West's in his writing say 100 and when unknown word and every 50 he wasn't doing it from research he was doing it from being a teacher who was writing material for students to read and that's what he came to the research shows that the more the great the higher the coverage the greater the comprehension will be so you can still comprehend a text with say certainly with 95% but the comprehension isn't as great as you'd probably like it to be and you can get some degree of comprehension with 90% but it's still you know you're getting further away from having good comprehension so there's been later research on that it's the I you don't want to take it to how would you say I was going to say too seriously you probably should take it a little bit seriously but you 98% is you know a fairly precise sort of figure and the rule of thumb that people who people apply with the extensive reading is you should pick up a book have a look and if there are you know a lot of unknown words on the first page or the second page you've probably got a book which is too difficult for you and if there's only a few unknown words then you've probably got a book at the right level and things like that you know so so you can try and get precise about it and and research can give you some support on that but but in practice it's quite good to just say look if you're over burdened with unknown words you read in the wrong book I know that um you know the next the next part of the kind of strand is is is meaning based output and what's what's interesting I think is that a lot of the the the system's out there you know systems and methods and and and also interestingly even polyglots that I've spoken to they're really always talk telling me that you know input is the thing it's like reading listening input input input and input and and so for me it's kind of refreshing to see you know a real focus put on output yeah well as it should it's it's it's common sense really because you're not going to be a good speaker unless you do some speaking you're not going to be a good writer and they should do some writing you know so so there's there's a one of the principles that I I think is a quite an important one but a very crude one is that what's called the time on task principle and that is if you want to be good at something do it a lot and it's it's a fairly crude quantity based principle but it almost always works and so that means if you want to be good at reading do lots of reading can you get really good at reading you know and particularly if you if you're getting comprehensible input and gradually you know keeping to your I plus one as you move up to the levels and so on but if you want to get good at speaking you're not gonna you know you're not gonna get there by just doing lots of reading it's gonna help but not going to take you that you know to become a good speaker you got to speak and so in a way then you know that that's the sort of common sense argument there's also some research support for the comprehensible output idea but it's probably not as strong as the as the input research yeah I've just finished a book with Rob Waring on extensive reading where we reviewed me a much of the research there is there is quite a lot of research and we tried to pick out what was the very best research and so on but the research evidence for comprehensible input is is very strong evidence but as its as you mentioned earlier it's it's really to get teachers accepting the idea that it's okay for learners to sit down and spend almost say close to a quarter of their learning time in and out of the classroom just sitting down quietly reading that's a hard thing for teachers to accept and they think but I should be teaching you know how can they learn if I'm not teaching and and how can we be sure that they're really reading and you know that they're really learning and so on and it's a brave teacher who lets that happen but the research shows that it does happen but it but it's it's difficult I I wanted to ask you about well I wanted to actually read to you a little bit from your from the PDF that's available on your website which is called what do you need to know to learn a foreign language and I think that any anybody who wants to actually learn a language and definitely needs to read that PDF because it's incredible and and there's one thing because that the next part of your the next part of the four strands is about language focused learning and and and this this was really interesting to me you said typically people think of the learning of grammar as involving the learning of names of parts of speech learning to describe grammatical constructions and learning how to correct errors however the there are these are all ways of doing deliberate learning and most of the learning of grammar needs to involve using the language if the research on vocabulary shows clearly that if you do deliberate study this it creates both what's called implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge Steve's crashing argument argument was that all deliberate learning only results in explicit knowledge but research by one of our PhD students arena Elgort showed that deliberate learning of vocab resulted in both explicit knowledge knowledge which you can retrieve from your brain and talk about and you're consciously aware of and so on but it also created implicit knowledge and but this I don't think the same as true for grammar and that's that's one of the the the issues that really needs more research in the learning of grammar I think that the explicit study of grammar results an explicit knowledge in and I think the people who focus on grammar learning like rod Ellis and others I think they they agree with that they argue that language use is required to develop implicit knowledge of grammatical features an implicit knowledge means the knowledge you use without having to consciously retrieve it so when you speak you don't think you know how do i construct this in and so on you just you make is your sentence and and so on and analyze a grammar so so I think it's even more important for grammar that you know there's a large amounts of opportunity for use and then the fourth the fourth trend is is about practice it's about fluency development so again could you sort of summarize this strand as just kind of more usage it's more usage but with no new language feature learning there that's a bit of a it's a bit of a cop-out in a way because there is language feature learning in the sense that you you strengthen your knowledge of non language features and you enrich your knowledge of non language features but it means that there isn't that good fluency development program doesn't involve unknowing vocabulary and doesn't involve unknown grammar and probably involves largely familiar content and it's just getting good at using what you already know one of one of my favorite stories for that is when I first taught in Japan I went and I taught a couple of weekend courses and in the week between the two weekend courses we we traveled around looking at beautiful places like Kyoto and so on and the time came for us to travel from Kyoto to Osaka to teach the second weekend course so we got on a train but I didn't I knew hardly any Japanese and so you know wasn't sure for us on the right train and so I I just looked around and there was a young student studious looking woman you know sitting there wearing glasses and everything saw she'll speak English so I said is this the train to Osaka and she looked at me and went buried buried her face in her hands and I thought what the hell have I done here because you know I've read about Japanese people you know once they lose face they commit harakiri and you know you never know what you're going to be responsible for and anyway a voice a man's voice from the front of the train said yes Osaka so that's all right so went along anyway so she's sitting in the road just you know the same row as us but with the aisle between us you know so I happened to accident and she picks she's saying she picks a book out of her bag and starts reading the book well I accidentally dropped my pen and I bend down to pick it up and look and see what's the name of the book she's reading in the books in English and it's called the macroeconomics of Agriculture and I thought what the hell's going on here because here is a book all the macroeconomics of Agriculture I can't read that book you know that I I'd be struggling and yet she's sitting there she's not flipping away to look at a dictionary or anything like that but she can't comp cope with the sentence is this a train to Osaka anyway we get to oh so I could get off the train and she comes up to us and says where are you going now I guarantee she'd been practicing that sentence for the last 15 minutes you know before the train gets it in anyway so we tell her what suburb we're heading to and she says follow me and so we follow her and we we managed them to strike up a kind of conversation and it turns out that she's a master's level student studying economics through the medium of English in the Japanese university and so on like that and so on but it seemed to me he was a he was a quite a good example of someone very knowledgeable about English but would know spoken very low degree of spoken fluency and you could see how if she had a course where she concentrated not on learning new vocabulary or things like that but just said let's take what you know and get that really good use and work that up to a level and where if someone says you can respond straightaway you know and and that's why fluency is a very important part of a course because you can know a lot but not be able to use it and so fluency needs to be across each one of the four skills of listening speaking reading and writing and the fluency the results from fluency courses are quite particularly reading fluency are quite striking you know you get learners doing a reading fluency course at the right level for them which means well below their current vocab real level and by spending about between 7 and 10 minutes in 20 different times you can double the reading speed of some learners and increase most of their reading speed by 50% you know now that seems too good to be true but time after time after time of doing speed reading courses shows that this is what happens and it's and so the the payoff for focusing on fluency is very high and it's a very part of a course that is that is really fascinating and and I wonder if a lot of you know a lot of students need to kind of stop with the obsession of moving to the next level and and just yeah focusing on improving the skills that they already have yeah well that's right so I think there's a lot of knowledge there which is not useable and the idea is making the best use of what you already know so I just wanted to talk a little bit about some vocabulary learning techniques because I was I was actually speaking to David crystal recently and and he said to me that you know grammar is something that you can kind of you know it has this finite kind of you know there's finite things to learn but vocabulary just seems like this impossible you know Mount Everest of of learning and he said he asked me said do you know any you know good techniques for vocabulary learning in the classroom and I said well it's kind of a bit like no not really it's more just about like reading and and he really wasn't impressed with with with my answer and so I'm wondering you know about if you could maybe talk a little bit about some kind of specific techniques like maybe flashcards and spaced repetition or things like that the most important selection principle for vocab Riyaz a principle of frequency and that is you should be learning high frequency words before low frequency words after you've learnt the high frequency words unless you have special purposes you should be going on to what's now called the mid frequency words and we now have very well researched carefully constructed word lists showing the rough order in which students should deal with vocabulary in that rough order to make sure that they get the best return for their learning and this is coming back to that first job of the teacher of planning making sure that you know then they're not learning this this rather useless topic related vocab reach differs from one topic to another but they're really consolidating this flow Kabri which is a cross across a useful across a wide range of topics and uses and so on like that so that's one thing the second thing about techniques for learning vocabulary well this is this is where I think the four strains has this is one of the the more profound but parts of the false friends if you ask how do you learn vocabulary how do you learn grammar how do you learn to read how do you learn to write how do you learn pronunciation the answer simply is the four strands so if you want to learn vocabulary you have to say okay how do I learn vocabulary meaning focused input okay so that means that if I want to learn vocabulary ding and extensive listening okay how do I live in vocab read through meaning focused output okay now I've got to find ways of turning my reading and listening into spoken and written production because if you can if you can connect the content of your input and output strands you increase the opportunities for repetition enormous ly and repetition there are only really two things that matter and learning vocab really if you want to get really simplistic and the first thing is repetition in the second thing is the quality of mental processing of the words that you want to learn and there are the two things that you've got to really deal with and then and then the third learning vocab area is well how do I deliberately learn at myself what should I do to deliberately learn vocabulary and the research is very clear on this that the answer is use flashcard programs or word cards put the translation from l1 on the back and the word you want to learn on the front and don't don't make your word cards too elaborate use phrases if you want to use phrases as well as words and so on but then do spaced retrieval you know not massed retrieval do spaced retrieval that is work on your word cards for ten minutes now put them away come back a few hours later have another go come back tomorrow have another go you know and then keep changing the order of the word cards and all sorts of things like that so but but the spaced retrieval thing for deliberate learning is a very is probably the most robust learning principle that we know of and and there's the research on this as a very it's an enormous body of research it's not just about learning vocab rias about learning you know memorizing anything really that's where teacher learner training learners is really important because you can do deliberate learning badly or you can do deliberate learning well and to do deliberate learning badly you know make a vocab notebook write the word and the notebook in its meaning next to it so you don't have to do retrieval you know that that's bad learning whereas if you use a flashcard program on your cell phone something like I know or something you know a program like that where you know you put the word in and then in the meaning and then you can see the word then you have to retrieve the meaning and you can go from meaning to the the word as well that sort of stuff these are very efficient if we look at quality of mental processing the shallowest type of mental processing is simply paying attention to it and I it's that's called noticing so you look at the word and in looking up a word in the dictionary is an example of noticing you just look at the word you look at its meaning say ah mm okay good now if you want to go deeper then what you should do is you should you know put your word onto a word card and then start doing retrieval where you look at the word and say what the hell did I write on the back of the word card you know and you're then trying to retrieve that meaning now if you want to move to a deeper level then a deeper level is what's what I now call varied meetings and varied use and that is you you come across the word or you you do retrieval but you do retrieval under different circumstances or with different contexts and so on and the reason why extensive reading is good for vocab relearning is because extensive reading provides many many opportunities for varied meetings with words so that means you meet a word and a graded reader and you might have to look it up and so on and the next time you see it in the graded reader it will be in a different context that's not I'm not making that up we've looked at we've done concordances of words in graded readers and and books and in almost invariably the word occurs in a different kind of context and and then you have to do retrieval again but this time there are different context clues and it's much there might be a different adjective with the noun or whatever like that and and that varied nurse really deepens the quality of mental processing and the deepest level is the level where you actually elaborate on the words you're learning so you do word part analysis or you use something like the key word technique which is a special kind of mnemonic technique for remembering the meanings of words and so on and and so or you you do things like Frank boss and his colleagues research things like where they they look at you know what does the sound does the sound or the shape of this word give you any indication of what the word might mean in trying to use some kind of elaborated mental mental connection to make that word stick in your memory now it doesn't mean that we should always be processing at the deepest level but it means that we should be trying to make use of retrieval we should be trying to make use of varied you and we should be trying to make use of elaboration wherever we can I I think that one you know one great thing that you talk about in your in your PDF and in your work in general is that you know you're honest about the fact that learning a language is really hard you know you're not going to learn a language in 30 days or whatever and and I'm wondering since since it's so difficult how can learners since it's so difficult and you need motivation right you need to have motivation to keep going how can learners do things like flashcards and lots of reading how can they do those things which which could be really boring right if they're not actually meaningful to them how can they kind of marry the things that are they're personally interested to with vocabulary that's going to be useful well this is part of the teacher's job too I mean the when you can read when you read your first book in English from the beginning to the end and understand most of it that's very motivating you know I I've been struggling to learn how to read Thai and when I got to the end of my first book I felt a real achievement I thought boy I've done that you know and that things so so that learners will feel that themselves but this this also needs to be marked and and one of the one of the ways in which testing can help or record-keeping can help is for learners to see that they are actually making progress and that there are signs of they're making progress and so with extensive reading you know the number of books read the time taken your reading speed and all that these things increase as you do these activities and teachers should be always drawing attention to those and making sure that the learners keep that motivation um but but language learning is a long job there's no doubt about it I mean native speakers have a vocabulary notice speakers of English have a vocab really roundabout whoo 1820 thousand or so words there's no way you're gonna pick that up in a year or six months or so on and and so you just have to see that if you want to get really good at it using a language it's a long-term job well just just one final question based on you know based on you know like 50 years of research and and your passion for you know for language learning what what is the kind of the kind of central thing that you really want any of the teachers and students who are watching this well what is the one thing you want them to to take away from your work I would guess that the I think I'd go back to what I said originally about training learners to take control of their own learning I think that teachers are probably very conscientious people who work hard but they have to realize that they're working hard can be counterproductive my teacher used to sort of amaze some of these classes by saying the best teacher is a lazy teacher but but there was always a truth underlying that because if the teacher is working hard that means that the wrong person in the classroom is working hard the learners should be working how the teacher the teacher knows the language why is the teacher working hard and so the teacher really should be making sure that the learning is being done by the learners and that they're working away at it so I think this idea of informing learners of showing them the range of options that they need to do to learn a language you know that deliberate learning is only a part of it an important part but only a part and that there is a balance of things to learn I think getting this knowledge across is really important well mr. Paul nation thank you very much for your time sir now you're very welcome okay good luck [Music] [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

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Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, how to learn english, how to learn english faster, learn english fast and easy, how to learn english fast, learn english grammar, how to learn english faster and better, how to learn english fast for beginners, how to study English well, how to study well and get good marks in english, how to study well for exams in english, techniques to learn english faster, tricks to learn english fast, tricks to learn english vocabulary

Id: grqYB4Y_mYI

Length: 42min 8sec (2528 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020