To achieve the best results in English learning, students should concentrate first on English conversation. Therefore, students must first learn to speak English well before they focus on writing skills.
Unfortunately, many learners try to do the opposite. They use classroom lectures, textbooks and grammar books to learn English. They use their eyes instead of their ears.
To master the spoken language, learners must spend most of their time listening to easy and understandable English conversation. That is the key to fluency, the key to speaking like a native speaker, the key to developing a clear accent. Listening activities should form 80% or more of an English learners study time.
Just listening is not enough – students must use a particular system of listening. First, they must listen to “easy” English. This means that learners should listen to material that they mostly understand. The general rule is that the student should understand 95% of what they hear.
Another important factor is deep listening. Deep listening means listening to the same material many, many times. By doing this, the learner absorbs the language into his or her subconscious, and is able to understand the material, and use it, instantly and effortlessly. For most people, two hours a day of listening is enough to achieve English fluency really fast.
Lastly, before attempting formal speech or written English students should first focus on casual “real English conversation”. This kind of English varies from language textbooks and classrooms. Studying this way, students have an opportunity to learn components of real English speech such as slang, idioms, filler words, sentence fragments, and interruptions. These components are very common and necessary for understanding native speakers and for having proper conversations with them.
I came to the conclusion that learning with natural English conversations is the most effective way to achieve language fluency.
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