Читать книгу Boost up your English - Александр Чумаков, Иван Иванович Мазур - Страница 7

Why do we learn stories here? That is a great question. You know, how much I love the “Why-questions”. Let me tell you why all my books, why all my English courses have stories and why the method I use when I teach English is called a story-telling method.

Story-telling is one of the best methods for learning foreign languages.

We, human beings, are storytelling creatures. Our brains love stories and we all learn from stories. Stories are vital. We convey our feelings, our mood, our energy and the truth with stories. We convey the mystery of the language. And most importantly, we learn English grammar intuitively like children do. That’s why stories.

I don’t mean, don’t learn Grammar. No. Grammar is important. I am saying that Grammar is difficult. Grammar is very difficult. Grammar is boring. It is hard to say anything interesting and comprehensible to people when teaching them languages and you have to focus on Grammar rules a lot.

Now let me share with you what one of the greatest language teachers has to say on language learning and language acquisition. His name is Stephen Krashen. I totally agree with him.

“There is a big difference between language learning and language acquisition. When you learn a language, for example, you learn English. You learn grammar rules, right? You learn all about the sentences and how words work together. And when you want to say something in English you make the sentence in your own language first, and then you drag out of your memory the words you need and put them into the sentence. That is painful. That is difficult. That is boring and it takes time.

When you acquire the language you understand what you hear. You can only acquire the language when you understand the language, you understand the message. The message has to be interesting and comprehensible. The message has to be compelling and understandable. Only when you are totally involved in the story, the world disappears around you. You forget that it is in another language. You acquire the language. Language acquisition happens.

I don’t mean, don’t learn Grammar. I don’t mean, if you study Grammar, go to jail. No, Grammar is important. I am saying that Grammar is difficult. Grammar is very difficult. Grammar is boring. It is really hard to say anything interesting and comprehensible to people when teaching them languages and you have to focus on Grammar rules a lot. What I have to do as a teacher is say things that are interesting, comprehensible, and then Grammar will take care of itself. And this is hard enough. All I need, as a teacher, is to make sure that you are paying attention and you are interested in what I am saying. It’s a good story. That is what you need. My job is to spread the story.”

Yes, Steven Krashen is absolutely correct and I cannot but agree with him.

It is very easy to give people input, information that is comprehensible, which means understandable, but not interesting. That is school.

It is very easy to give people input, information that is interesting, but not comprehensible, not understandable. That is the outside world.

Some teachers in Universities devote their lives to giving us input that is neither comprehensible nor interesting.

My job is to do both and that is hard. But this is the most important task of language teaching. The easy part is the theory: comprehensible and interesting. Fine! But tough, difficult part is how do you make input interesting and comprehensible? Not just interesting and understandable, but compelling. Compelling means extremely or very interesting. Compelling means so interesting you forget that it is in another language. That is the goal. That is why I sit down and create these compelling and comprehensible, interesting and understandable stories for you.

When you tell a story something remarkable happens: imagination flies and magic begins. What’s why stories.

By the way, there is a good and useful video on my YouTube Channel about the same topic. I am encouraging you to go and watch it. Here is the direct link there. Just scan the QR code and you will be there. Enjoy watching it.