An article about practice that every language learner probably does routinely. How do you break down your goals?
Since finishing college, this has been my approach to handling any new task, skill, or hobby that I want to focus on.
The amount of time you spend working on something does not equal the quality of the output. Jogging the same routes, for instance, clocking up similar times every weekend will never transform you into a world-class athlete no matter how long you keep at it. Some of us strive to excel, but for most the thought of committing to even more training is daunting.
So what if self-improvement did not require such a huge investment of time? Are there special qualities that people who strive for the top possess that allow them to rise above the rest? BBC Capital asked a gold-medal winning Olympic coach, a record-holding football manager and a super learner.
Stop repeating mistakes
Sixty minutes spent doing ‘the right thing’ is better than any amount of time spent learning in an unfocussed way, according to professor Anders Ericsson of Florida State University. Identifying areas that need work then devising a purposeful plan to correct them is crucial. Ericsson calls this process ‘deliberate practice’.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190318-how-to-master-new-skills-with-deliberate-practice
It's what goes on behind the hood that makes people who don't engage in this type of focused or deliberate practice based on goals think that those who have a degree of proficiency or expertise in a skill must be "talented" or that they don't have what it takes to become good as well when they see a skill being performed.
Even when someone knows that practice is involved in skill proficiency, they still may think about it the wrong way. There was a thread the other day about language learning in which someone said that even if they spend thousands of hours playing a sport(or any other hobby), they still wouldn't be good because they don't have the right genes. It's not about practice, but rather practice with specific and measurable goals. Taking even further, it's about breaking down a concrete goal into measurable steps that we can use for guidance.
On any given day for language learning, I take a look at what I need to focus on beginning with the components of reading, listening, writing, and speaking. From there, I'll look at CEFR rubrics to pick something specific that I think I need to hone in one and try to find a task that is related to that. For writing for example, I might try to focus on giving a complex opinion about climate change. Then I'll have it corrected. As I'm analyzing my mistakes, I'll sort them according to types of mistakes they are. Then I'll use a grammar book to focus on my most frequency errors and write a few sentences to have my friends check them out. Then I'll revisit that same essay topic and see if I can do the same thing again while exhibiting more mastery over my topic and the mistakes I made in my prior essay.
Tips from the article:
Start with your goal. What are you trying to achieve: to be the best in the world, or something else? Without knowing where you want to get to, you cannot plan.
Work backwards from your goal, what do you need to do to get there? Eliminate things from your training that are unnecessary for meeting your goal.
Break up your plan into smaller steps. Set yourself deadlines. This way you will know if you are starting to fall behind or have plateaued.
Ask for feedback from someone experienced, or film yourself at your task. If you want to be a good public speaker, film yourself presenting and compare it to other videos of speakers.
If you plateau you might need to work backwards. What do other people do that you do not? Getting worse before you get better is a real possibility.
So what do you guys do? I have my methods, but I'm sure that in a colloborative sub-reddit such as this one, we could all pick up new tips and tweaks that could help us refine our methods of deliberative practice and goal setting.
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from ಸ್ವಾಗತ | Languagelearning https://ift.tt/2OkiNFb
via Learn Online English Speaking
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