Chapter 2: Four Rules for Learning Spoken English
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There are four simple rules you must follow when you are learning to speak English:
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To learn to speak English correctly, you must speak it aloud.
It is important that you speak loudly and clearly when you are studying spoken English. You are retraining your mind to respond to a new pattern of proprioceptive and auditory stimuli. This can only be done when you are speaking aloud at full volume.
One of the reasons that your English study in school required so much time while producing such poor results is that none of the silent study did anything to train your tongue to speak English.
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To learn to speak English fluently, you must think in English.
The proprioceptive sense is not all that you are retraining when you learn spoken English. There is cognitive learning (memory) which must also take place. Grammar-based English instruction has emphasized cognitive learning to the exclusion of retraining the proprioceptive sense. Nonetheless, cognitive learning is an important part of learning to speak English fluently.
For speech to occur, your mind must be actively involved in syntax development. The more actively your mind is involved in spoken English, the more effective the learning process becomes.
However, just as you will hinder proprioceptive training by trying to study silently, so you will also limit cognitive learning by reading from a text rather than constructing the syntax in your own mind. If you are studying English with Spoken English Learned Quickly, you may use the written text when you first study a new exercise. However, after repeating the exercise two or three times, you must close the text and do the exercise from recall memory as you listen to the audio recording. You must force your mind to think in English by using your recall memory when you are studying spoken exercises. You cannot read from a text.
I will come back to this later in Chapter 5: Selecting a Text, because there will be times when reading from a text such as a newspaper is an effective language learning tool. But when you are doing sentence responses with recorded exercises, you must force your mind to develop the syntax by doing the exercise without reading from a text.
You are not thinking in English if you are reading. Making your mind work in order to think of the answer is an important part of learning to speak English.
