Paul Tagney - Easy Spoken English

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.. Although this book isnt extensive textwise, thats because its here to help you write a much more extensive text telling the story of your life. Thats the text thatll show you how to speak fluently in English, and any other languages you want to learn. So here you go, find yourself an English person, or a nativespeaker of any language you want to learn, someone who can be your teacher for a short period of time, talk about your life with them, talk to them about their life, get it all written down in normal Spoken English with their help, or in the language you want to learn, read it over to perfect your pronunciation, and English, or the language you choose to work on, will become one more language thats part of your daytoday life. Learning Spoken English, and any other language, can be done simply and practically using the method presented in this book, as opposed to spending months, if not years studying grammar and fictitious situations in lengthy and time consuming courses, which focus on numerous workbooks which have no relevance to your reallife situation.

Although this book is written initially in English, the spoken language method it presents can definitely be applied to any other language you want to learn. As its author, I developed this program over many years while working as an English Conversation teacher. First I wrote and developed a series of adult education textbooks for small groups with a maximum of ten students per class. These groups often eventually consisted of only five or six students, with all course lessons being of three hours duration. Classes met once a week, initially for 10 weeks, or 30 hours of lessons. As the textbooks developed, the courses became 25 weeks in length, or 75 hours of lessons.

The key to the success of these initial courses for everyone who took them, was the fact that the lessons lasted a full three hours, as opposed to the classic academic hour of 45 minutes, or even a 90 minute class, which is the time frame used by most commercial language institutes. In recent years Ive learned that our brain functions in the following way when learning a language. During the first 45 minutes, it warms up, and if the class stops there, it quickly forgets most of what has been presented(This in fact applies to a 90 minute class also). But when the class time is extended to 180 minutes, or three hours, then in the second 90 minutes the brain really kicks in and actually retains the information. Its sort of like what happens when we go to the gym to work out. We do an initial warmup period, which just activates our body but doesnt really do any constructive muscle building. Once weve warmed up, then the body starts to enjoy the experience, and gathers and retains strength from the time we spend on our sports program.

A good long workout will leave you feeling tired, but your body will retain the strength and grow stronger with every training session. The same thing happens to our brain when we study a language. It warms up in 4590 minutes, and if we do a further 90 minutes of language study once our brain is well activated, then the language material we learn in the 3hour session is retained and is there for us to build on at the next class. All my initial adult students saw very good progress in their Spoken English, even though they were only taking one 3hour class per week. They were all working at jobs where they used their Spoken English each day, and they gave themselves maximum exposure to English media through television and newspapers outside of class time as well. So the language progress they made in each 3hour class was retained and reinforced from one lesson to the next.

Then, a few years later, I began working exclusively with private clients on homestay programs. These clients came to stay with me for periods of 12 weeks, during which we did 15 hours of private Spoken English lessons per week, each lesson being of 3 hours duration. We used the same basic format that I had developed for the small groups, with clients talking about themselves and their lives, and asking me questions about my life. It was simply normal conversation between two people on average daily topics, which is what any spoken language consists of! So this book presents the course outline of what I have perfected over 20+ years, working with small groups and private clients. The lessons as presented can be used when working with children or adults. You, the teacher, simply animate conversation with your student, write down each sentence the student says which requires some perfecting in its structure or pronunciation, and slowly but surely the student ends up writing their own personal life story in English, or whatever language theyre learning.

Then they can carry on with their new language outside of the lessons, and talk every day with other speakers of the language theyre learning. I found that, generally, as I animated conversation and listened to my students, in 1520 minutes Id fill up one 8x11 page with doublespaced sentences. Each time we had a full page, Id let the student read the page back to me, to check their pronunciation. At each new class, the student came with a page or so of written diary, which mentioned what theyd done since the last class. Then I asked them questions about what their diary expressed, to keep our dialogue mainly in the present and relating to their every day activities. I also asked students to always come to each lesson with five new questions to ask me, since a natural part of any normal conversation consists of questions that flow back and forth between the people who are talking.

Over the weeks of their course, clients built up a bank of the normal questions they liked to ask people in daily conversation, and I made sure that all their favorite questions were correctly written in Spoken English. The first section of this book presents all major content from the first series of textbooks I wrote for small adult groups. The lessons progress in such a way as to focus on the students life and family, then on normal activities which a person involves themselves with over time. The first six lessons should be used over 5 or 6 threehour classes, to build the foundation of a persons selfpresentation in their new language. At that point, a student is often already conversant, and may simply continue learning on their own. If the client or clients have the time for extended private or semiprivate lessons, the lessons could continue for up to four or five weeks or longer, as the client decides, with up to 5 threehour classes per week.

The clients eventually decide themselves at which point there isnt any real need for further lessons.

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