Reading: The Witch Doctor of Language Acquisition

Author: Robert A. Robles

‘What is the best thing I can do to master the language I’m learning?’ ‘What do you recommend if I need to increase my vocabulary base?’ ‘How can I learn idioms and stop sounding like a language student?’ These are just a few of the questions I’ve fielded as a language instructor in over fifteen years in the classroom. Plus this one, ‘Why do I keep making the same mistakes?’

Interesting questions, all of them. And valid, too.

It’s not surprising that people of all ages strive to improve on the knowledge they have acquired when studying a second—or third, or fourth—foreign language. What I do find surprising is the amount of students who still fail to recognize that there’s a surefire, entertaining, easy, cheap, miraculous way of improving their language skills, once they’re past a certain stage of proficiency. Even more amazing is the fact that they feel so let down, express so much disappointment, and view the answer to their questions as an insurmountable task: all you have to do is read.

And keep doing it for the next six or seven years… At least.

How come language learners feel bewildered at the fact that learning a foreign language—and mastering it—will usually take years? After all, how long did it take us to master our native tongue? Why should a foreign language, which we don’t usually hear, read, speak everywhere we go, be any easier? Or faster?

The answer may lie in false expectations created by success stories we hear every day, false promises issued by language institutes the world over, who’ll do anything to increase their enrollment figures, and the fact that many of us don’t always stop to think of what learning a language truly involves. So, will you join me in searching for better answers?

Let’s see.

First: learning a language produces better results when studying goes hand in hand with becoming familiarized with the culture inherently intertwined with it. Traveling helps, and not because it exposes our senses to the language we pursue, but because language is embodied in a country’s culture. However, for those of us who have little opportunity to take a Sabbatical year and head overseas, TV and films are good options, music as well, the Internet necessarily, but nothing compares to a good book, in my view. More on this later.

Meanwhile, here’s a quirky example for the above: look at the Spanish expression “Mátalas callando.” Literally, it means “Kill them quietly.” It depicts a person who hurts others, tells gossip about others, or acts falsely-even with hypocrisy-while giving the appearance of innocence.

How hard would it be to understand this everyday-Spanish adjective, if you heard someone use it in connection to another person? Hard, for sure. But, if I told you that this particular expression is a follow-up on this other: “No mata ni una mosca” (Won’t kill even a fly)? Clearly, a person who won’t even kill a fly is a truly good person, while a person who kills them quietly is a hypocrite.

You’d have to live the Mexican culture, or at least find the reference clearly illustrated in a novel’s dialogue or a TV show, to be able to make sense of it, wouldn’t you?

Second: learning through music (with lyrics, ideally) is a very efficient way of developing fluency and pronunciation—as long as your neighbors don’t gang up on you and decide to throw you out of your apartment building—because in order to sing along you must learn to keep up with a beat, which means picking up or decreasing the tempo, metric, and rhythm of a tune. This produces in our brain a natural understanding of syllabication: one of those details we never seem to get quite right at school and academies. Apart from that, while singing along with the singer in your iPod, you naturally attempt to copy pronunciation. This is great training, even if it sounds a little off!

Of course, reading out loud also helps, but unless you’re coached by someone knowledgeable, it lacks the instant feedback you obtain from your own contrast with the singer’s pronunciation in music.

Third: Be a good sport and try this tonight—tune in to your favorite TV or radio news show. Listen to the talking head attentively for a few minutes, trying to get the hang of his speed, nuance, and speech patterns. When you’re ready, begin to repeat whole sentences he just said, one instant after you heard them. He’ll continue talking, obviously, but never mind that. Just do it. At first, you’ll miss many of the sentences that come while and after you speak, but soon you’ll get the hang of it and be able to pay attention to the news narrator while repeating his previous words.

This will serve as a more advanced exercise to the sing-along exercise described above. Keep doing it for a few weeks, and get back to me. Your fluency will improve; bet on it.

Fourth: now we come to the skeleton in the closet, the ghoul in our nightmares, the specter in the classroom: grammar. What’s with all this concern about grammar? Who came up with the idea that teaching people the grammar of a language is equivalent to teaching a language? Think of grammar this way: you’re playing a long, complex game; grammar is just the rules of the game.

And learning the rules by heart doesn’t make you a good player.

Listen to music, watch a good TV show, participate in a billion blogs, read a good novel. When you’re done, begin again. Talk to people in the language you wish to master, join a good reading club (there are excellent online reading clubs out there.) Use the language: that’s the point. Grammar will come naturally to you when you expose yourself to the bombardment of language on every front.





Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you don’t need to study grammar. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t make sense to give the study of grammar a pivotal role in your studies. Conversation, listening practice, writing, and, definitely, reading should hold center stage in your language acquisition process.

When you read, your brain processes language patterns, spelling, grammar, idioms, punctuation and capitalization rules, the use of accents in languages that use them, and all while you have a good time!

Plus, there’s no more effective way of increasing your vocabulary base than reading. Bottom line: reading is the witch-doctor of language acquisition.

Finally, that question I left hanging out in the open at the beginning of the article: ‘Why do I keep making the same mistakes?’

There’s nothing wrong with you. Let me start by stressing that. It happens to every language learner. It happens because you haven’t moved to a stage where you have learned the appropriate corrections to your mistakes, or because you haven’t practiced those corrections. Many of my students bitterly beat themselves up arguing that the reasoning I just outlined can’t be right, since they already know the right way to produce the language, and still make those mistakes. Yeah. It happens all the time.

It’s just that knowing that I must add-an-“s”-at-the-end-of-a-verb-in-present-tense-when-speaking-in-the-third-person-singular-in-English… whew! That’s just not conducive to good oral skills! That’s merely parroting a rule. Intellectually you know it. Now put it in play.

It takes self-awareness, and it takes metacognition—the knowledge of how you learn and what strategies work best for you, in a nutshell—but more than anything it takes practice.

The best practice we’ve been able to come up with this side of the Asteroid Belt… is reading.

Read what you like. Read from good authors. Read the classics.

Just read.

About the Author: Robert A. Robles is an Elementary School Teacher and Curriculum Coordinator in Cancun, Mexico. He is also the author of ‘, a sci fi novel for teens to be published later in the year.





