For my friend
I've taught English for years and lately I keep coming back to one simple idea: make the language personal. Not just accurate, not just translated. I see again and again people who understand the rule, who can translate it perfectly, but... It doesn't sound or feel like them. Because recognition isn't retrieval. Seeing a phrase and thinking, 'Yeah, I know that', is very different from producing it mid-conversation with no support. So I'm leaning into small shifts. Notice it, understand it, then close the page and say it. Hang it on your own life. Use your wake-up time, your numbers, your city, your opinions. Retrieval + relevance ties the language to memory. And that’s when it stops feeling foreign and starts sounding like you. Your brain has to go and find it. And finding it is a skill in itself. You can learn it.We spend a lot of time helping people put information into their brains. But we need to spend much more time practicing pulling it out. And emotion, identity, humor, relevance, all of that matters. Because our memories like connections. Why would your brain keep a random sentence about someone you don’t know, doing something you don’t care about? But ask me what I do on Monday morning, who I have dinner with, what my plans depend on, suddenly there’s something real to hook onto. And that’s the point. I don’t want students to create a sentence with a new word. I want them to create their sentence. If you are learning, for example: it depends on. I don’t want you to translate it or try to memorize the rule, I want you to create examples on how you could use it, as in : It depends on how tired I am, the weather, who I’m with. Now that language belongs somewhere. So now what I’m doing much more deliberately is this. Start with controlled practice. Of course. At 7:30, on Monday, in the morning. Fine. But then very quickly, I want to ask you, what time do you wake up? What do you do on Monday? And then remove the support. Close the page. Say it again. That little moment of, wait, that’s retrieval. Recognition gives us comfort. Retrieval gives us truth. And this is why the more I study learning, the less interested I am in giving students more information. Most people don’t need more. They need to do more with what they already have. So I build in these steps: notice it, understand it, use it with support, retrieve it, manipulate it, make it personal, remove the support, retrieve it again, and later, bring it back when they’re not expecting it. In real life, no one tells you, now we’re going to use the present simple. You’re just talking, trying to say something that matters. And maybe that’s why so many people say, “I understand English, but when I need to speak, my mind goes blank.” Maybe it’s not that the English isn’t there. Maybe the retrieval route isn’t strong enough, yet. And if that’s true, then adding more information isn’t always the answer. More grammar, more lists, more apps, more content, more things to study. Sometimes it’s not about more in, it’s about more out. This has changed how I build materials. I’ll start controlled, sure, but then make it real, personal, remove my support, bring it back later. I don’t want the language to belong to the exercise. I want it to survive without the exercise. Because ultimately, I don’t want English sitting in a separate little box in your brain labelled “English class.” I want it connected to everything you already have. Your work, your memories, your humour, your opinions, your identity, the things you care about, the stories you tell, your weirdness, you. Maybe this is becoming a teaching philosophy for me, or maybe a manifesto. After almost three decades of teaching English, I find myself strangely less interested in teaching English. I’m interested in learning, in attention, in memory, in retrieval, in identity. In what has to happen in the brain before a foreign language stops feeling foreign. And I keep coming back to ownership. Because perhaps fluency is built little by little when English stops being something you know about and becomes something You think with. Something you reach for. Something you play with. Something that starts to sound like you. So next time you learn a word, a chunk, a structure, don’t stop at, what does this mean? Ask a better question. What’s does this mean in my life? Then use it. Close the page. See if you can still find it. Recall it. Make it personal. Own it.
Jo Alves
Change the way you see yourself ©
I have been telling my students non-stop that they are stuck on the intermediate plateau because they simply do not listen to the language. They do not have intimacy with the rhythm, with chunks and expressions, and their speaking is based on translation. And I ask them one simple thing: increase your input. Yet, to my surprise, they are willing to do loads of things, except that.
So why are students, in general, so reluctant to listen to podcasts, movies, TV shows, or anything in English? And when I say listen, I mean really pay attention to it, not translate simultaneously in their minds or rely on subtitles.
First of all, I believe this is due to the fact that many teachers still rely on massive amounts of grammar exercises. This leads to the belief that “I am not speaking well because my grammar is not good enough, I need more exercises” and this couldn’t be more inaccurate.