How Practice Can Damage Your EnglishI. New interpretations

How Practice Can Damage Your English
    Good morning, everyone. Today, I am going to talk about the negative role of practice in English learning.
    If you ask "How can I learn to speak English better?", many people will tell you "Practice, practice, practice". "Speak and write in English whenever you can"—they will say. All English classes are full of activities which involve speaking and writing which are supposed to help you with your English.
    We agree that practice can be very useful. It’s even necessary to learn English well. So what’s the problem? The problem is that for many learners, "speaking" or "writing" means "making a lot of mistakes". Some people make a mistake in every sentence! If you don’t make many mistakes, then you can speak or write in English and it can only help. But if you make many mistakes, then every time you write or speak, you reinforce your mistakes. As you write or speak, you repeat your mistakes constantly and your incorrect habits become stronger.
    Imagine this situation: You are writing an e-mail message in English. Your English is not perfect and you want to write the message quickly. You write incorrectly: "I want speak English." When you write a sentence, you also read it. So the incorrect sentence goes into your head. The next time you write a message, you will be more likely to write "I want finish" or "I want be happy". Why? Because "I want speak English" is fresh in your head—you’ve just used it! And when you write "I want do something" the second time, you’ve got a "bad habit", or a reinforced mistake.
    Now do you see our point? You write—you make mistakes—those mistakes become your habit, they become your way of writing in English. So, the more you write, the worse your English becomes. We have said that you need practice to learn English. We have also said that when you practice, you reinforce your mistakes.
    Michal suggests a simple solution to this paradox: Never make mistakes! According to what he says, it is close to the truth that you have never written an incorrect English sentence. You knew many grammatical structures and you used only those that you knew. Your sentences were similar to sentences which you knew to be correct. You followed good examples, so all your sentences were good. In the beginning, you could write only very simple sentences, but all the simple sentences were correct. Then as you advanced, you added more and more complicated structures, and again all your sentences were correct. Because of this approach, you were never reinforcing bad habits. You never had any bad habits! From the beginning, you copied only correct sentences. With every sentence that you wrote, you reinforced your good habits.
    On the other side, if you make many mistakes, speaking and writing is not the way to eliminate them! On the contrary, it reinforces them, as we have shown earlier.
    You have to realize that speaking does not improve your grammar or your vocabulary. It’s really very simple. Can you learn a new word from yourself? If you don’t know how to say "Good bye" in English, can you invent it by yourself? No, you can’t. You can only learn it by reading or listening to English. So what you should do if you can’t help but make mistakes in your English sentences? If you make mistakes, that means you don’t know how to say things in English. You need to learn how to say them. You won’t learn that by speaking or writing. You must read and listen to correct English sentences. You can speak and write later—when you can already build correct English sentences and want to improve your fluency. Perhaps you can benefit from corrections if you get a few corrections per week. But when there are many mistakes, you become unable to concentrate on them. If a teacher returns your composition with 20 corrected mistakes, how many of these corrections can you keep in your mind? Besides, your teacher is not always there. What if you’re writing an e-mail message on your own or talking to someone else? Other people usually ignore your mistakes, and even your teacher does not point out all of them.
    The conclusion would be that fighting your mistakes is not easy, so it’s better to avoid making mistakes altogether.
    First, try to be more careful by using the rules of error-free speaking. If you still make a lot of mistakes, or if you find that the rules are killing your motivation, you probably shouldn’t open your mouth just now. Instead, try to get more input by reading and listening in English. True, but believe us—you can learn English with almost no mistakes. How? You can fill your brain with correct sentences and imitate them. You can simply follow good examples.
    Moreover, sometimes you can say or write something which you think is wrong. You can do it if you want to learn how to say something in English. For example, if you are talking to a native speaker, you can do this: First, say "I’m not sure how to say this in English, but..." and then say your sentence which is probably wrong. And the other person can tell you how to say it in English correctly. From that you learn the correct way to say the sentence.
    Notice that this technique is only safe if you know that you are saying something which may be wrong, or you are sure that the other person will correct you if you make a mistake. And you use it only occasionally.
    In summary, it should be noted that practice can also serve as a negative factor in English learning. Hope all of you can find the solution to it from today’s lecture.