Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking?

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thevagrant88
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Re: Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking?

Postby thevagrant88 » Mon Jun 27, 2022 3:06 am

Kraut wrote:Although final words seem to have been spoken, here is a discussion on Reddit of a Gringo having reached a high level of Spanish who still feels he is not up to fully engage in conversations among Spanish speakers.

My personal perspective on language learning discourse

https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... _learning/


Thanks for the link! I think it’s safe to say at this point that when it comes to languages there will never be a… last….word ;)


That pun really took a lot of my soul out of me.
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Re: Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking?

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jun 29, 2022 3:12 pm

BeaP wrote:I'm searching for new techniques for improving speaking skills because I'm too lazy or demotivated to do the ones that I already know.


Just want to comment on this. I don't think it is about being lazy or demotivated. It's that any method needs some sort of automaticity or engagement from us for us to do it repeatedly - this is just the type of monkeys that we are. So something that creates the right level of interest, the right level of learning at time x will only last for a while.

Lazy and demotivated are really weighted, and negative self valuations.

It just may be that you need the process to engage you differently at different points in your (gasp, I'm going to say that self-help word) 'journey'.

I know I do.
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Re: Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking?

Postby MaggieMae » Thu Jun 30, 2022 11:40 am

Late to the party, but I wanted to put in my two cents, too.

Journaling was mentioned a couple times, but I don't know if you've thought about video journaling. Just flip the camera on once a day, talk for a few minutes about anything in the world, and then once a week, every other week, or once a month, whenever your time allows, go back and listen to the entries and see if you catch yourself making common mistakes, or if there are words you want to use often, but you need to look them up and learn them. This is how my practicum teacher and I discovered that our class had general problems with do vs does, etc.
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Re: Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking?

Postby munyag » Wed Jul 06, 2022 5:21 pm

Le Baron wrote:
jeffers wrote:However, I think the benefit of shadowing comes from the fact that there's no proper break (e.g. the listening part of repetition), so it is more like real speech. Repitition is obviously better for practicing pronunciation, but shadowing is an effective exercise for developing fluency and automaticity (is that a word?) This is also because shadowing requires more quick thinking than repitition, more mental engagement, which are skills needed during conversation in the wild.


This was the problem for me when the other fellow mentioned something similar in another thread: listening/repeating without engagement or whatever it was. To me shadowing feels like effort with no real thinking, because it is just a repeat-what-I-say scenario with no regard as to what the words mean. In actual speech you have to be cognisant of what you say and mean and it means having control over things, over word choice and what you want to say. I still don't know what shadowing is supposed to do for this, apart from getting your vocal apparatus familiar with forming sounds.


I could be wrong but a resource like Assimil would be ideal for shadowing due to the clear audio and you also have the French and English alongside each other. Perhaps if you could;
1-Shadow an Assimil dialogue first time round for pronunciation practice
2-You could shadow the French whilst looking at the corresponding English dialogue
3-You could listen to the French and produce what you hear in written or spoken English
4-Once you can shadow perfectly and translate either orally or in written form what is said in your target language then you can move on to the next dialogue.

***There are more experienced and more qualified advanced learners who can give better advice but I guess at least you can turn shadowing using the above points into an "active" activity rather than a passive one
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Re: Other ways of improving speaking skills apart from…speaking?

Postby Le Baron » Wed Jul 06, 2022 5:35 pm

munyag wrote:I could be wrong but a resource like Assimil would be ideal for shadowing due to the clear audio and you also have the French and English alongside each other. Perhaps if you could;
1-Shadow an Assimil dialogue first time round for pronunciation practice
2-You could shadow the French whilst looking at the corresponding English dialogue
3-You could listen to the French and produce what you hear in written or spoken English
4-Once you can shadow perfectly and translate either orally or in written form what is said in your target language then you can move on to the next dialogue.

***There are more experienced and more qualified advanced learners who can give better advice but I guess at least you can turn shadowing using the above points into an "active" activity rather than a passive one

I'm not learning French.

The issue around shadowing is not that I can't do do it or don't know what it's supposed to be, but that there was another discussion about doing it (or actually it was listening) without even considering the meaning of the content.

I see value in shadowing and have done it for a long time (as perhaps many language learners have instinctively before these things were specifically named) and its value is in training speech formation.

I don't think producing translations like that does anything. Whatever the language is you happen to be learning, you need to get past translating like that to only recognising the meaning of the TL in use.
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