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Fluency Made Achievable

The document discusses the importance of developing all four core language skills - listening, reading, speaking, and writing - for achieving fluency in another language. It uses an anecdote of a woman who could speak to hotel staff in French but struggled to understand their responses to illustrate that speaking alone is not sufficient. The book aims to help learners identify weaknesses in their skills and provides exercises to strengthen areas like listening, reading, and writing in addition to speaking. Mastering all facets of a language is presented as key to fluency and avoiding situations where gaps in other skills are exposed.

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kakimog738
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537 views4 pages

Fluency Made Achievable

The document discusses the importance of developing all four core language skills - listening, reading, speaking, and writing - for achieving fluency in another language. It uses an anecdote of a woman who could speak to hotel staff in French but struggled to understand their responses to illustrate that speaking alone is not sufficient. The book aims to help learners identify weaknesses in their skills and provides exercises to strengthen areas like listening, reading, and writing in addition to speaking. Mastering all facets of a language is presented as key to fluency and avoiding situations where gaps in other skills are exposed.

Uploaded by

kakimog738
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The

 following  is  an  excerpt  of  “Fluency  Made  Achievable”,  a  


language  learning  book  by  Kerstin  Hammes.  

Read  more  about  the  book  at  


www.fluentlanguage.co.uk/languageskills  
 
Why  speaking  a  language  is  not  the  whole  story  

“I would love to be able to speak another language!”

Speaking another language, that’s a great and powerful image. Think of


what it would be like to just delve into a completely different way of
speaking and thinking. Speaking another language, that’s associated
with accomplishment, achievement and having something to be proud
of. When most people are using the word ‘speak’ in this context of
language mastery, it means more than just being able to make the right
sounds and put the right words in the right order. They talk about
someone who
- Processses sounds quickly and has great hearing comprehension
- Reads various texts in another language with ease
- Can write letters, emails, maybe even a CV in the foreign language
- And, of course, pronounces the words correctly and participates
actively in a conversation with native speakers.

If you could speak a language without the other skills, would that be
enough?

Let me illustrate this with a story about my former colleague Claire, a


native English speaker. She’s a naturally meticulous person who likes to
go into any new situation well-prepared and organised. Upon booking a
trip to France, she applied those organisation skills to preparing herself
in great detail for the arrival at her hotel. She ran through what she was
going to say and practised the necessary phrases. Claire was ready for a
real French conversation! At the hotel, she confidently walked up to the
receptionist, introduced herself and started speaking French, and
immediately found her precise preparations busted when the
receptionist started answering in French!

I still struggle with this problem myself all the time - helping out
recently in a French language telephone survey, I realised that talking
to the client would be so much easier if I didn't have to understand what
they were saying in response. If speaking a language is all we ever had
to do to be able to communicate, we'd only have to learn things by heart,
recite them and watch as the world stands and applauds our linguistic
skills.

To me, thinking about your language learning project as the path to


speaking another language is a misnomer. What we all really want to
achieve with our new language is so much more, and it will always
involve comprehending the spoken language, easily reading whatever it
thrusts at us and scribbling words without hesitation.

Listening, reading, speaking and writing are all part of the path to the
goal of every language learner: fluent, confident command of another
language. The emphasis on any one of those different skills will help you
make fast progress at different learning stages. But as Claire and I have
had to experience, training yourself in only half of the core language
skills means you will be caught out in others.

So, how can learners work out where their weaknesses are and how
to address them?

This book aims to make you familiar with all four core language skills.
It’s not exhaustive and not the final authority on language learning, but
I hope that you will be able to take some great pointers from it, try out
fresh exercises and address any weak spots in your own language
learning.

Section 1 explains why I believe it's so important that you get the mix
right in order to produce a balanced result. There’s a quiz to help you
work out which areas may need more work in your personal learning
project.

In Section 2, you will find tried-and-tested techniques for targeting each


of the four skills. These exercises and ideas are designed to get you
practicing straight away, so you can improve your listening, reading,
writing and speaking.

Finally, Section 3 of the book is our interview section where I have


added interviews with expert learners who are all fluent in at least 3
languages. The interviews contain even more exercise ideas and
suggestions for what you can do next.

It’s  all  in  the  mix  

Have you ever wondered why so many language students are put
through their paces with a large variety of exercises from dictation to
role-play? The answer is in the nature of language as a whole
communication system. You can’t learn a whole system with just one
type of exercise and one viewpoint. Instead, what makes language
learning especially interesting is the fact that it demands strength in so
many different skills from you as a learner. Nobody says this is easy,
but it’s a magnificent challenge.
Language learning has many benefits and purposes, and it stays with
you for life. It is not uncommon for learners to start engaging with a
new language for one reason, and find that their motivations evolve in
line with the progress. When I was thrown into my first French lessons,
for example, the purpose of my studies was just to do well in this school
subject and understand new words and sentences. I wasn’t even
thinking about going to the country and speaking to people, and even
today I’ve never spent more than a fortnight at a time in a French-
speaking environment. But I’ve benefited from knowing French in many
other ways. I never did get straight As in French, but always kept
studying it for self-development and the joy of knowledge. I like being
able to read the papers straight from the kiosk and to enjoy testing my
skills when watching French films. Compare that to the large number of
language learners who cite conversing with native speakers as their
goal – perhaps for a trip abroad? These different ways of engaging with
your new language are all just parts of the bigger picture, and I urge you
to stick with it for as long as you can.

For me, it is important to keep in mind the view of language as a


working system with many components. Being able to establish
confidence and fluency, and to reap that joy of knowledge in a
sustainable way requires a mix of all four core language skills. You can
see the importance in having a balanced set of these skills by looking at
many of the language exams critical to immigration and acquiring
qualifications and employment in a foreign country. The language
exams are made up of various sections aimed at testing your listening,
reading, speaking and writing. Failing any one of them can mean failing
the whole exam.

Read  more  about  the  book  at  www.fluentlanguage.co.uk/languageskills  


Send  your  feedback,  questions  and  comments  to  
[email protected]

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