Active Training of English Skills Beats Passive Learning

Abstract: English is not a knowledge set to be memorized; rather it is a skill to be trained. Use of passive learning of separate language components is less efficient than modern active learning of all components concurrently.

There are thousands of English Language Training Centers in the world using a multitude of different methods for teaching English with a rather limited success. Teachers and learners believe that there is no shortcut to become fluent in English. Google provides 4170 references explaining why "there are no shortcuts to learning English."

Let's consider why the common belief about no shortcuts has penetrated the belief system of teachers and educators. All traditional methods of teaching English consider language as information to be remembered. They dissect the language into individual components and teach reading, writing, pronunciation, speaking, and grammar separately. In this environment of passive learning a learner needs to spend four or five years of hard work to speak fluently.

We spend years in school learning a lot of subjects. Schools teach most subjects using textbooks, lectures, notes, memorization and tests. The only problem is that language skills cannot be learned in this way, any more than you can learn to play the guitar or drive a car by reading or even memorizing the instruction manuals. That is why after learning English for three-plus years, you are still not able to communicate in it fluently.

English is not a knowledge set to be memorized; rather it is a skill to be acquired by practicing under guided instruction or by using mobile application with the new pedagogy of active learning. The problem is that active learning was invented only recently and is unknown to teachers or educators. Google contains only eight references on "active learning of English skills," and they all point to the Language Bridge Technology.

This article is for adults learning English. Children do not have this problem and acquire any language in their environment subconsciously by forming direct links from images and concepts to words and phrases in
the new language. So every language that a child learns becomes native to him. Children preserve this ability until about 12 years of age.

It is hard to persuade teachers that English is a skill to be trained since they believe that the only option for teaching it due to large class size is to lecture about the language. There is a much better solution that I will describe after elaborating on why all conventional methods involve passive learning.

According to the Learning Pyramid, we remember about 20% of what we hear. Speaking more, by itself, will not improve your vocabulary and grammar; actually, it can make things worse. To acquire language patterns and intuitive grammar - it is not enough to speak because you are just practicing what you already know. Some teachers think that because their learners spend 80% of class time speaking in English, they use active learning method. However, in reality, only one person speaks at a time, and the rest of the class passively listens to the peers speaking in broken English.

The learning becomes active when each learner spends 80% of class time speaking in English. It seems that we have reached a dead end. How on earth could you have all learners to speak all the time? No conventional method allows for that.

However, the unconventional method called the Language Bridge Technology (LBT) allows exactly this-active training of English skills. To learn English effectively, it is not enough to read or listen or write or speak - all those skills should be practiced concurrently while a learner understands the context and is emotionally involved in it. LBT achieves this objective by using android application that introduces speech shadowing of lessons and drills that all learners wearing headsets, perform at the same time. This allows the brain to remember language patterns and intuitive grammar, and prepare it for thinking and speaking in English.

Each learner, using the LBT application, speaks 80% of the time in class about familiar situations and concepts they understand. The application provides support in Mandarin when the learner needs it, but the main experience is in English.

The application lets learners share recorded sessions with friends or with a teacher. Three types of texts are used in every lesson:
1. Pre-recorded lessons on various topics and drills, which ensure training of language skills instead of memorizing vocabulary lists or grammar rules.
2. Lessons added by a learner or a teacher, thus making the application interactive and suited for vocational training.
3. Inspirational poem recorded by a native speaker, which allows learners to re-enact an understandable situation in English.

Conclusion: THERE IS A SHORTCUT to becoming fluent in English in less than a year! To take it you will need to implement active learning or training English skills. In active learning all language skills - reading, writing, pronunciation, speaking, and grammar are learned concurrently using the latest mobile learning combined with the patented pedagogy of training English skills.

By Arkady Zilberman

https://www.linkedin.com/in/languagebridgetechnology

Arkady Zilberman has a Ph.D. in material science and has to his credit 6 patents in Russia, 8 patents in the USA, and one patent application in China, filed in May, 2015. The latest patent is called "Reverse language resonance systems and methods for foreign language acquisition."
During many years of his work as a scientist and simultaneous interpreter, he was trying to find an answer to the question: why do some people like him learn a foreign language easily, whereas most adults have a hard time getting to grips with a foreign language, and many simply give up?
After many years of experimenting during simultaneous interpretation and reading research on how adults learn foreign languages, Arkady made a few discoveries described in the web site www.lbtechnology.net and in his Amazon eBook: http://amzn.to/1GZdpk1.
Arkady offers the patented Language Bridge Technology for first year-free licensing to companies and language schools, which want to recycle their content and bring it into the 21st century learning platform.


Arkady Zilberman, Ph. D.
CEO and Founder,
Language Bridge Technology
www.lbtechnology.net

info@lbtechnology.net